



T 



Class 

Book I _fi^ 



~7 



Copyright^? /*? 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



WORKS WRITTEN OR EDITED BY 

HENRY S. PANCOAST 

AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH LITERA- 
TURE. Revised and Enlarged. Printed from 
new plates. With maps. i2mo. $1-35 net. 

STUDY L.STS, CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES, 
AND MAPS — To accompany "An Introduc- 
tion to English Literature." izmo. 50c. 

In collaboration with Percy V. D. Shelly 
FIRST BOOK IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

497 PP- Large i2mo. $1.25 

REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH LITERATURE 
514 pp. Large i2mo. $1.60. 

STANDARD ENGLISH POEMS 

749 PP* i2mo. $1.50. 

STANDARD ENGLISH PROSE 

550 pp. Large i2mo. $1.50. 

AN INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LITERA- 
TURE. Revised. With study lists of -works 
to be read, references, chronological tables, and 
portraits. 393 pp. i6mo. $ 1.24. 

ENGLISH PROSE AND VERSE; From Beowulf 
to Stevenson. 816 pp. 8vo. $2.00. 

In collaboration ivith Professor J. D. Spaeth 
EARLY ENGLISH POEMS. 

548 pp. i2mo. $1.50. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
New York Boston Chicago 



AN INTRODUCTION 



TO 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



BY 

HENRY S. PANCOAST 

n 



FOURTH EDITION. ENLARGED 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



£ 



^w 



Copyright, 1894. 

BY 

HENRY HOLT & CO. 

COPYBIGHT, 1907, 1917, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



DEC 14 1917 
©CI.A479526 



PREFACE 

TO THE THIRD EDITION. 



Fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry Holt asked me to arrange 
a series of representative selections from English litera- 
ture in chronological order, and to connect them with such 
biographical and historical matter as might be found 
necessary for an understanding of them, and of their 
relation to national and literary history. The result of 
this request was a book, Representative English Literature, 
which appeared in 1892. In this book, owing to the large 
proportion of space taken up by selections, the historical 
sketch was necessarily very brief, and a few years later, 
at Mr. Holt's suggestion, I prepared a second book, An 
Introduction to English Literature, based on the first, in 
which the selections were omitted and the historical out- 
line revised and considerably expanded. Two years later 
this second book was enlarged by the addition of further 
biographical and other matter. In the present book the 
subject is treated with still greater fulness but upon the 
same general plan. The first half of the book has been 
practically re-written, and the chapters dealing with the 
Early and Middle English periods have been considerably 

iii 



iv PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 

enlarged. Greater space has also been given to the 
literature of the Queen Anne and Victorian periods, and 
separate lives of Bunyan, Dry den, Steele, Cowper, and 
others have been added. 

No one who attempts to act as guide in this long jour- 
ney from Beowulf to Kipling believes himself secure from 
error, unless he is very foolish or preternaturally learned. 
I can only say, for my own part, that I have tried faith- 
fully to avoid mistakes, that I have, so far as possible, 
shunned controversy, and that in matters of opinion I 
have honestly set down the truth as it appeared to me. 
I am painfully conscious that, in spite of all the labours of 
others, it is a difficult, perhaps an impossible, thing to see 
the whole origin, growth, and development of English 
literature in a just proportion; to see the relation of each 
book, each man, each event, to the whole story, to inter- 
pret every great writer with equal sympathy and fairness, 
and to get at the heart of every great book. One's only 
comfort is, that the very vastness, the very impossi- 
bility of the undertaking can be urged in mitigation of 
one's inevitable shortcomings. Well may the author of 
even a short and unpretentious history of English litera- 
ture say with Chaucer — 

" I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere, 
And wayke been the oxen in my plough." 

I have had more friendly help in the preparation of 
this book than I can suitably or specifically acknowledge. 
Dr. Arthur Adams, of Trinity College, read a great part of 
the manuscript and furnished me with much of the 
material for the bibliography. Mr. Keith Willoughby 
has given many hours of conscientious labour to the prep- 



PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. V 

aration of the chronological tables, and I am deeply- 
indebted in various ways to Professor Cecil F. Lavell, 
Professor Felix E. Schelling, Mr. W. C. Carle ton, the librarian 
of Trinity College, and Mr. George Dana Smith, the assist- 
ant librarian of the Watkinson Library, Hartford. 

H. S. P. 

Hartford, September 3, 1907. 



NOTE TO THE FOURTH EDITION. 



A chapter has been added to the present edition, sketch- 
ing some of the more important tendencies in English lit- 
erary history, during the latter part of the Victorian Age 
and since its close. " To-day is a new day," and the object 
of this outline is to show the beginnings of the new era 
and its relation to its predecessors. Recent and living 
writers have, therefore, been treated only incidentally, as 
illustrations of the various literary changes and tendencies 
which mark the time, while many authors of distinction 
have been reluctantly omitted. 

Chestnut Hill, June 18, 1917. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

INTRODUCTION 1 



PART I. 
THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION, cir. 670 — cir. 1400. 

CHAPTER I. From the Beginning . to the Norman Con- 
quest 11 

I. The Making of the Race 15 

II. The Geographical Position of England 30 

III. The Making of the Literature 32 

CHAPTER II. From the Norman Conquest to Chaucer . 72 

CHAPTER III. The Age of Chaucer. 104 

Chaucer's Century 104 

Literature in the Fourteenth Century 112 

William Langland 125 

Geoffrey Chaucer 132 

PART II. 

THE PERIOD OF THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE, cir. 1400 — 

cir. 1660. 

CHAPTER I. The Followers of Chaucer and the Decline 

of Mediaeval Literature 155 

CHAPTER II. Beginning of the English Renaissance, 1400- 

1509 171 

CHAPTER III. The Entrance of the New Learning into 

Literature, 1509-1579 182 

vi 



CONTENTS. Vil 

PAGE 

CHAPTER IV. The Culmination of the English Renaissance, 

1579-1637 191 

Elizabethan England 191 

Edmund Spenser 202 

The English Drama before Shakespeare 211 

William Shakespeare 229 

Richard Hooker . . . . 247 

Francis Bacon „ . . 250 

Summary of Elizabethan Literature o . . 253 

CHAPTER V. The Decline of the Renaissance 257 

The England of Milton 257 

Later Elizabethan Literature, the Drama 261 

The Poets of the Early Seventeenth Century 267 

John Milton 278 

Seventeenth Century Prose 289 

John Bunyan 295 



PART III. 
THE FRENCH INFLUENCE, 1660 — cir. 1750. 

CHAPTER I. The England of the Restoration 305 

The England of Dryden 305 

John Dryden 312 

Other Restoration Writers 319 

CHAPTER II. The Age of Pope 322 

Augustan England 322 

Alexander Pope 326 

Some Minor Poets of Pope's Time 336 

Authorship in the Augustan Age: The New Prose 340 

Sir Richard Steele 344 

Joseph Addison 351 

The History of the Novel , 357 

Daniel Defoe 363 

Jonathan Swift . . . . . 372 

Other Prose-Writers of the Eighteenth Century ..... . 380 

Richardson and Fielding , 387 



Vlll CONTEXTS. 

PAGE 

PART IV. 
THE .MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD, since cir. 1725. 

CHAPTER I. The Beginning of Modern Literature . . 393 

Eighteenth-Century England: The Old Literature and the New 393 

Oliver Goldsmith 422 

Edmund Burke 429 

William Cowper 436 

Robert Burns 444 

William Wordsworth 450 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 459 

Sir Walter Scott 470 

Charles Lamb 480 

Thomas De Quincey .' 482 

Later Poets of the Revolution: Byron and Shelley 489 

John Keats 504 

CHAPTER II. Victorian England,, cir. 1S32 — 1901 ... 516 

CHAPTER III. The New Eea. cir. 1880 — cir. 1915 ... 628 

APPENDIX 

List to accompany Map showing Principal Religious Founda- 
tions, etc. ' 647 

List of Authors to accompany Literary Map of England . . . 649 

General Table of English Literature 653 

Study Lists 657 

Index . . . • 705 

MAPS. 

Sketch Map of Elizabethan London 200 

Map showing the principal Religious Foundations, Monastic 

Schools, in England during the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries . 647 

Literary Map of England 649 

Map of English Lake Country 652 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

INTRODUCTION. 

English literature is the expression in memorable poetry 
and prose ot the life and character of the English people. 
In English history we see the character of the 
erature and people revealed through action. The English 
English people establish a great nation: the English 
nation founds a great colonial empire. The 
English extend their language to the ends of the earth: 
they build up one of the noblest and richest literatures 
known to history. How have they been able to produce 
this literature? Not because they were naturally fond of 
talking, like the Gauls; not because they had any peculiar 
talent for making verses, or any especial turn for saying 
graceful or pretty things. English literature, like English 
history, is memorable and inspiring because it is the genuine 
expression of a great race. / When a brave, earnest man, who 
has felt, and seen, and done much, tells you his innermost 
thoughts, he is worth listening to ; and when a nation like 
the English speaks to us out of its heart through its books, 
its books are worth reading.) For more than fourteen hun- 
dred years, generation after generation of Englishmen has 
tried to put something of its life into words. At first the 
attempts were crude and imperfect; the nation struggled to 
speak through the rough song of some heroic deed or the 
brief chronicle of historical events ; but as time went on, the 
soul of the people found a readier and fuller utterance in 
ballad and drama, and epic and novel, in books on reli- 
gion, or history, or philosophy. So that at last in that long 

1 



2 INTRODUCTION. 

succession of books which make up English literature, we 
have the record of the inner life of the people, of the loves 
and hatreds, doubts and fears, hopes and beliefs of each 
succeeding generation; the story of the nation, told by the 
nation itself for those who can read and understand. 

It is clear that English literature is thus a part of Eng- 
lish history, and that any historical event which vitally 
changes the life and thought of the people changes their 
literature also. Thus, such important events as the intro- 
duction of Christianity into England, the triumph of King 
Alfred over the Danes, the conquest of England by the Nor- 
mans, or the loss of Normandy by King John, are turning- 
points in the literature as well as in the history. The great 
divisions of English history and of English lit- 
icai divisions erature are therefore the same. The history of 
of English lit- the literature, reflecting the changes that have 
followed each other in the outward or inner life 
of the race, naturally divides itself into four main periods of 
development: • 

I. The Period of Preparation. 

* About 670 to about 1400. 

II. The Period of Italian Influence. 
About 1400 to about 1660. 

III. The Period of French Influence. 

About 1660 to about 1750. 

IV. The Modern Period. 

Since about 1725. 

No exact dates can be given for any of these periods. 
Changes in the mental life of a nation, and in the literature 
which reflects that life, come gradually, — so gradually that 
it is impossible to state the exact year in which such a 
change takes place. Yet each of these periods has a char- 
acter of its own, each has certain traits that distinguish 



PERIOD OF PREPARATION. 3 

it from the rest. We all know that childhood differs from 
youth, and youth from manhood; although we cannot fix 
upon the precise minute when the individual passes from 
one of these stages of growth to another. In the same way 
these periods, or stages in the growth of the nation's lit- 
erature, are no less real because their limits cannot be pre- 
cisely defined. We must try to get some general idea of 
the nature of each of these four periods at the beginning, 
although their character and meaning will become clearer 
after we have studied them more fully. 

I. The Period of Preparation. 
From about 670 to about 1400. 

During this long period of more than seven hundred 
years we find no poets worthy to be compared with Shakes- 
peare, Milton, or Tennyson, no prose writers at all equal 
to Burke, or Ruskin, or Carlyle. Yet these seven centu- 
ries did much to prepare the way for them and for the other 
writers of the later time. This long preparatory period 
was a time of national growth and national discipline, in 
which England was made ready for the work of her ma- 
turity, and the foundations of her literature were laid. 
When it began, England was not one united nation. There 
was no king who ruled over all England, and the people in 
different parts of the island spoke different languages, or 
different dialects of the same tongue. The eastern part of 
the land was broken up into a number of small Anglo- 
Saxon kingdoms, often at war among themselves; the 
western part was held by the still unconquered Britons, the 
people whom the English called the Welsh. To the north 
of the English and the Britons lay the land of the Scot, 
a wild region, comparatively barren and mountainous, 
thinly inhabited by yet other tribes, bearing some resem- 
blance to the Britons but differing from them, and dif- 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

fering still more from the English in manners and in speech. 
Small as it was, the island was thus broken up into sepa- 
rate and often hostile communities; on every side there was 
a conflict of authority, a confusion of race, of tribes, and 
of tongues. 

As there was no nation, and no national language, there 
could be no truly national literature. Such literature as 
there was, was local; for, as each poet used the speech of 
the little community in which he lived, many of those who 
dwelt in other sections could not have understood his 
poems even if they had heard them. Now one great work 
of these preparatory centuries, was to make a single and 
united nation out of these separate or hostile races and 
tribes; another great work was to make a language capable 
of expressing the thoughts of a great nation, a language 
which should in turn become the mother-tongue of the 
whole people. By the end of the fourteenth century the 
hardest part of these two great tasks had been accomplished. 
Although Scotland was still an independent kingdom, Eng- 
land had become a strong and united nation; and. while 
Gaelic was still spoken in the Scotch Highlands, while Welsh 
still lingered in Wales, and many dialects were still used in 
England, the foundations of a national language had been 
securely laid. At one period in the history of these seven 
centuries, the Danes had poured into England, bringing 
with them their own speech; at another, the Normans had 
conquered the land, and they spoke Norman-French. But 
the English language, although it was modified by the in- 
fluence first of the Danes, and then of the Norman-French, 
held its place against its foreign rivals. By 1400 one es- 
pecial variety of this modified, or Frenchified, English, that 
spoken in and about London, was already in a fair way to 
become the national language. The fact that this was the 
form of English used at the Court, and employed by the 
Court poets and other writers of the capital, naturally 



ITALIAN INFLUENCE 5 

raised it to a position of importance; and it is from this 
particular dialect, that the English we speak to-day, how- 
ever enlarged or modified, is directly derived. 

In these centuries the way was further prepared for the 
triumphs of the later literature by the training, the civil- 
ising of the English race. The first great agency in this 
training was the Christian religion. The Christian Church 
was the earliest civiliser of these untamed English, and she 
labored faithfully to train and educate men's minds as well 
as to save their souls. The second great civilising agency 
was the influence of the Normans, who conquered England 
in 1066. The Norman was a hard master, but he brought 
with him from the Continent a higher scholarship and a 
more courtly and polished civilisation than was then 
known in England. The Norman brought also his chival- 
ric and romantic literature, as well as his language. 

Now the fourteenth century is the time when the mix- 
ture of all the various elements, separate and antagonistic 
at first, begins to be fairly complete. Then, as we shall 
see, many of these elements in life, literature, and language 
were combined in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer (about 
1340-1400), the first great poet of this united England. 

II. The Period of Italian Influence 
From about 1400 to about 1660. 

In this period the thought and imagination of England 
were wonderfully broadened and quickened by a new 
spirit that was changing the civilisation of Europe. The 
great change that took place in the life of Europe during 
the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, is known 
as the Renaissance, or re-birth, because in many ways Eu- 
ropean civilisation seemed at that time to be born again. 
It was a stirring and adventurous time, when men were full 
of energy and enthusiasm, and when they claimed a greater 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

freedom of thought and action. Europe was passing out 
of the narrower and more restricted life of the Middle Ages ; 
Greek and Latin art and literature, long neglected and for- 
gotten, were studied with delight; and the finer minds re- 
sponded to the influence of new feelings and ideas. Italy, 
the first European nation to resume the study of Greek, 
was the leader in this "revival" of the old learning, and 
she became the teacher and inspirer of Europe. It was not 
long before the passion for the "Greek learning" crossed 
the Alps. Nation after nation learned the new love of let- 
ters, the new delight in life and in beauty, and France, 
Germany, and England came under the power of this new 
spirit. 

The effect of this influence of Italy is deeply impressed 
upon the literature of England. At first it made itself felt 
chiefly at the universities. At Oxford and Cambridge, the 
two great centres of learning, it gave a fresh impulse to 
education, it introduced new subjects of study, and it pro- 
duced scholars of a new type. As we should expect, the 
effect of these changes in education and scholarship was 
soon apparent in literature, and books were published which 
spread the new ideas still more widely. But the influence 
of Italian style and culture was not a purely literary 
or educational influence. While it began at the colleges, 
with the learned men, the teachers, and the writers, it soon 
extended far beyond this comparatively small field and 
entered into the life of the nation at large. If we study the 
state of England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558- 
1603), we shall find traces of the popularity of Italian fash- 
ions, Italian tastes, and Italian literature, on almost every 
side. Architecture, dress, and landscape gardening, showed 
the fascination which Italy then exercised over the English 
mind. Italy, in fact, had poured into England a new life 
as well as a new learning; and this new life was quickened 
by the many great things which were then taking place in 



FRENCH INFLUENCE. 7 

Europe and America. During the reigns of Elizabeth and 
James I, this Renaissance spirit found its supreme literary 
expression in Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, and their great 
contemporaries. 

During the seventeenth century the influence of Italy 
upon England began to decline. A change came over the 
spirit of the people, and the time and energy of the nation 
were largely taken up with grave problems in government 
and religion. Yet these troubled years, when the Puritan 
fought with the Cavalier, left their mark upon literature 
likewise. This is the age of Cromwell, the man who worked 
the will of England with his sword, but it is also the age of 
Milton, the man who expressed the noblest spirit of England 
with his pen, and Cromwell and Milton stand side by side. 

III. The Period of French Influence. 

From 1660 to about 1750. 

After the new thoughts and mighty passions that came 
with the Renaissance had spent their force, England seemed 
for the time to have grown tired of great feelings either in 
poetry or in religion. She became scientific, intellectual, 
cold, and inclined to attach great importance to the style, 
or manner, of writing, thinking that great works were pro- 
duced by study and art rather than by the inspiration of 
genius. This tendency was encouraged, perhaps originated, 
by the example and influence of the French. This was dur- 
ing the brilliant reign of Louis XIV, when such writers as 
Moliere, Racine, Corneille, and Boileau, were making French 
literature and literary standards fashionable in Europe. 
Charles II ascended the throne in 1660, after his youth of 
exile on the Continent, bringing with him a liking for things 
French; and for a time there was a tendency on the part of 
some writers to turn to France for their models, and to 
adopt the French theories of the art of writing. France, 



8 INTRODUCTION. 

however, exerted no such profound influence as Italy had 
exercised during the preceding period. It is true that a 
marked change took place in both the form and spirit of 
English literature at this time; but this seems to have been 
due far more to an altered condition of affairs at home, than 
to the influence from abroad. After the Restoration, John 
Dryden became the leading man of letters in England, and 
early in the eighteenth century we reach the so-called 
" Augustan Age," when Queen Anne was on the throne, and 
Pope and. Swift, Steele and Addison, lived and wrote. 

IV. The Modern English Period. 

From about 1725 to the present day. 

In the course of this eventful period, great changes have 
taken place both in the social and political condition of 
England and in her place among the other nations of the 
earth. Old customs and ideas, old ways of living and 
methods of government, have been greatly altered or alto- 
gether given up", and Modern England has come into exist- 
ence, the familiar England of to-day. While these changes 
have been at work at home, the change in England's rela- 
tions to the world without has been correspondingly great 
and important. She has made her power felt far beyond 
the limits of Europe : she has built up a vast colonial em- 
pire, planting new Englands in the Far East and the Far 
West. Countless -ships carry her manufactures over almost 
every sea; her sons go out to live among strange people; 
and her civilisation, her language, and her literature, have 
become known in the farthest parts of the earth. 

As England has changed, her literature has changed like- 
wise, and her new experiences at home and abroad have 
found a voice in her poetry and her prose. It is true that 
she has shown from time to time the passing influence of 
some foreign literature; but, on the whole, her inspiration 



MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD. 9 

during this period has come from within rather than from 
without. It is, above all, the life of modern England that 
has produced the literature of modern England. 

Only a few general features of the literary history of this 
period need be mentioned here. As the eighteenth century 
advanced, the scoffing, sceptical, and trifling spirit that had 
been apparent in the literature of Queen Anne's time, be- 
gan to give place to a greater depth and seriousness. Tastes, 
ideas, and habits were changing, and literature both pro- 
moted and expressed the changes. A succession of poets 
taught men to find pleasure in the country, and taught 
them a deeper love and respect for mankind. Other poets 
awakened men's interest in the life of the past, and es- 
pecially in the Middle Ages, the golden time of chivalry and 
romance. The Scotch poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) was 
among those who sang of freedom and human brotherhood; 
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was one of the greatest 
and most original of the interpreters of nature; and Sir 
Walter Scott (1771-1832) did more than any other writer 
to create a popular enthusiasm for the Middle Ages and to 
give the romantic past a place in the popular imagination. 
Throughout the whole of this period we can see the effects 
on English literature of the more general diffusion of 
knowledge, and of that rapid advance of democratic insti- 
tutions and ideas which is a leading feature in the history of 
the times. In Europe, as well as in England, the old order 
of society was being transformed by these new ideas, and the 
French Revolution (1789-1815), the most startling and dra- 
matic outcome of this change, profoundly stirred some of 
the greatest English writers. This new passion for liberty 
and equality animates the earlier verse of Wordsworth, 
and makes itself felt a little later in the poetry of Byron 
(1788-1824) and Shelley (1792-1822). 

The England of Victoria (1837-1901), the England of 
science and of steam, of social discontent and social reform, 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

of new theories of the universe, and of anxious question- 
ings of the old faith, records in its literature the doubts and 
conflicts of an era full of momentous change. Alfred 
Tennyson (1809-1892) stands out as the most compre- 
hensive and melodious interpreter of this age in poetry: 
it can boast of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and 
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), in science and philos- 
ophy : while in literary prose, it can show such illustrious 
men as Macaulay, Newman, Dickens, Thackeray, Ruskin, 
and Carlyle. 

From the latter part of the nineteenth century still other 
changes begin to be apparent in the life and literature of 
England. There is a wide-spread tendency to abandon 
the methods and ideals of the Victorian Age, and explore 
new paths. Through the works of Rudyard Kipling 
and others, the life of the Colonies and of the world beyond 
the British Isles begins to take a larger place in English 
literature. The drama, long over-shadowed by the novel, 
attains a new importance in the plays of such writers as 
Bernard Shaw, and the genius of Ireland asserts itself 
more strongly in a national literary revival, known as the 
" Celtic Renaissance." 

Having gained some preliminary notion of the general 
trend of literary history in England and of some of the 
great stages of growth through which the nation has 
passed, we may now take up these periods at greater 
length. 



PART I. 

THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION 

(About 670 to about 1400). 

CHAPTER I. 

FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 

The great work of this long preparatory period, which 
stretches from the dim beginning of English literature 
_ . £ a . e to the work of Chaucer in the latter half of 

Union of dif- , . , 

ferent races, the fourteenth century, was the uniting of 
languages, and j. ne various elements which are combined in 

literatures. 

Chaucer and in the literature of England since 
his time. These elements were at first quite separate, 
or, in some cases, actually antagonistic. They mixed 
slowly and reluctantly; but the pressure of circumstances, 
the course of events, steadily forced them together, and 
in time each was compelled to contribute its share to the 
life and the literature of a composite but united nation. 
Thus we saw, in the brief survey of this period, that during 
these centuries one race was made by the mixture of many ; 
one language by the mixture, for the most part, of English 
and French; one literature from the literatures of the 
English, the Celt, and the Norman, enriched and developed 
by Christianity, and by the learning and culture of Rome. 
The enforced mingling of such varied elements introduced, 
for a time, a great confusion and disorder. There were 
rival races, rival languages, each with a literature of its 
own; but all this struggle, hard as it may have seemed at 
the time, was not without meaning and purpose, for the 

11 



12 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

variety of the elements thus brought together gave extraor- 
dinary richness to the language and greater breadth and 
fulness to the national literature and life. This mixture 
of elements is now so complete that many of us never 
realise that the books we read and the words we use every 
day are silent witnesses to the composite character of our 
English literature and our English speech. A single illus- 
tration will help to make this clear. Let us take the follow- 
ing lines from the song to the water-nymph Sabrina, in 
Milton's poem of Comus, and try to find out some of the 
elements which have contributed to the making of this 
one passage. 

" Sabrina fair, 

Listen where thou art sitting 
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, 

In twisted braids of lilies knitting 
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair 
Listen for dear honour's sake, 
Goddess of the silver lake, 
Listen and save ! " 1 

Now there is probably not a word in this passage that 
seems to you foreign, or unfamiliar; it is simply our well- 
known English from first to last. Yet if we were to exam- 
ine it more closely, if we should look up the history of each 
of these words in some good dictionary, we should find 
that some of them were originally not English words at all, 
but Latin or French. Thus, honour is the Old French word 
honur, which is derived in its turn from the Latin honor, 
and which survives in the modern French honneur. Now 
this word is one of the living witnesses to the composite 
character of our English speech. It reminds us that 
England was once conquered and ruled by a French-speak- 

1 Comus, 1. 859. The words printed here in italics are those which 
have come in from the Latin or the Norman-French. The French 
language grew out of the Latin, hence the origin of these French words 
is Latin. Nevertheless they did not come into the English directly 
from the Latin, but through the medium of the French. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE COMPOSITE. 13 

ing people, for it is one of the thousands of words that 
contact with the Norman brought into the English speech. 
Honour is a word which has come into our language from 
the Latin through the French. Translucent (Latin trans- 
lucens; trans, through, and lucere, to shine) has been 
brought in directly from the Latin with only a trifling 
change. As such words as honour, train, and save, carry us 
back to the Norman Conquest, and show us that what we 
know as the English language is in reality partly French, 
so Sabrina takes us back to the Roman occupation of 
Britain at a much earlier time, for Sabrina was the name 
given by the Romans to the river Severn. 1 By far the 
larger number of words in the passage, however, are pure 
English; that is, they are the modern representatives of 
words in use among the English, or Anglo-Saxons, from a 
very early time. Thus, listen is the modern form of the 
Anglo-Saxon hlystan; under is the Anglo-Saxon under, and 
so on. Yet there are enough French and Latin words 
mixed with those of pure English origin to suggest to us 
that our daily speech is a composite language, compounded 
of English and French. 

But as the language of this passage is essentially English, 
so its poetic form is essentially un-English, essentially dif- 
ferent from the characteristic Anglo-Saxon verse. The 
early English made alliteration the basis of their verse; that 
is, they systematically introduced into it words beginning 
with the same letter or sound. With them alliteration was 
not an ornament, or an accident; it was an absolutely neces- 
sary feature of their verse. Now English poets have long 
since given up the Anglo-Saxon method of writing poetry 
and adopted another. It is true that they still use allitera- 
tion, but they no longer make it an essential part of their 

1 Some suppose Sabrina to be the Roman form of a Celtic name of 
the river, and that it means a boundary; but, in any case, the name is 
a relic of the Roman rule. See Severn in Names and their Histories by 
Isaac Taylor. 



14 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

verse ; they employ it as a mere ornamental addition, that 
they can introduce or leave out as they please. After the 
Norman Conquest, the form of verse natural to the English 
was gradually abandoned in favor of a foreign method of 
writing poetry, an important feature of which was the use 
of rhyme. This new method was brought in by the Nor- 
mans. This little poem of Sabrina, based as it is on rhyme 
and metre and not on alliteration, bears witness, in its form 
as well as in its language, to the influence of the Norman; 
it leads us to think of the extent of that influence upon the 
great body of English verse. 

So far in our study of these few lines, we have found 
traces of a mixture of English and Norman, with a hint of 
another great influence in the background, — the influence of 
the old-world civilisation of Rome. But when we turn from 
the language and the outward form of these lines and look 
into their subject, we find then the impress of yet another 
literature and of another race. The story of Sabrina, the 
guardian nymph of the river Severn, is not English, nor 
Norman, nor Roman, but Celtic. It belongs to the legen- 
dary history of the Welsh, or Britons, the Celtic people who 
lived in the Island before the English came, and it was told 
to English readers by a Welshman a great many hundred 
years before Milton's time. 1 Nor is this all. A few lines 
farther on in the poem we come upon a number of classical 
allusions, and see that Milton has not hesitated to mingle 
Greek and Roman mythology with this old myth of the 
Celt. 

We see, then, that in actual fact, all these elements, the 
English, the Norman, the Roman, and the Celtic, have 
united to make this one little song. Of course this is not 

1 It is found, along with many other stories, in a History of Britain 
(Historia Regum Britannia) by Geoffrey of Monmouth, written about 
the middle of the twelfth century. The legend won a place for itself 
in English literature, and it is referred to by Spenser, Drayton, and 
other English poets. 



MAKING OF THE RACE. 15 

always the case. All English poems, for example, are not 
founded upon Celtic legends, although it is likely that many 
more show the influence of the Celtic spirit and disposition 
than we might at first be inclined to believe. Neverthe- 
less, it is certain that every one of these various elements 
is present in different proportions in the great body of our 
English literature. This fact should be clearly under- 
stood in the very beginning of our study of English litera- 
ture, for the mingling of these different elements has made 
that literature what it is. 

What, then, were these elements that went to the mak- 
ing of England, where did they come from, how 
tfEnSan? were ^ ne ^ J ome d together, and what did each 
contribute to the final result? 

The answer to these questions will tell us how the founda- 
tions of English literature were laid. 



I. The Making of the Race. 

The races which have mingled in different proportions 
to make the modern English are : 

a. The English, a people of German or Teutonic stock. 
They were akin to the great races of Northwestern 
Europe, — the Germans, the Scandinavians, and the 
Danes. 

b. The Britons, who belonged, as we have said, to the 
Celtic race. Among their kindred were the Irish and the 
Scots. 

c. The Danes, who were closely related to the Eng- 
lish. 

d. The Normans, the men of the North, or Northmen 
from Scandinavia, who won lands for themselves in 
the north of France. The Normans came of the same 
Teutonic stock as the English, but they settled in a 
country where the basis of the population was Celtic, 



16 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

and where the civilisation was derived mainly from that 
of Rome. 1 

It appears from this list, that representatives of the two 
great races of Northwestern Europe, the Teutonic and the 
Celtic, have entered at various times into the composition 
of that mixed people the modern English. To appreciate 
what this union of two great race-stocks means, we must 
know something of the Englishman and the Briton before 
it took place. 

The English. 

The English conquerors of Britain were three Germanic 
tribes, the Angles (or Engles), the Saxons, and the Jutes. 
The early They came from the Northwestern limits of 
home of the that great wilderness which the Romans called 
ng s ' Germania. To the Romans, Germania, a vast 
tract of swamps and forests inhabited by fierce and bar- 
barous tribes, seemed beyond the boundary of the civilised 
world. The Roman historian Tacitus describes it as " a land 
hideous and rude, under a rigorous climate, dismal to behold 
or to cultivate." 2 The English tribes dwelt on the bor- 
ders of the Baltic and of the North Sea, in one of the bleak- 
est, most exposed, and most gloomy regions of this for- 

1 The following table, although based primarily on language, will 
help to make the position of the English and Britons more plain. 

ARYAN 

_ ! 

Eastern Classic Celtic Teutonic. Sclavonians 

Branch. Group. Group. (Russians) 

Hindoo Greek Ca,e\io I Irisn Goths 

Persian Roman ( Scotch Scandinavians 

{Britons (Normans originally 
Breton or were mainl y from 
ArmoSLns this stock ) 
Gau s Hi £ h Germans 
^ auls Low Germans 
I 

Frisian English 

(Dutch) i j j 

Angles Jutes Saxons 



J Germania. 



THE EARLY ENGLISH. 17 

bidding land; the Saxons in the low-lying tracts about the 
mouths of the rivers Elbe and Weser; the Angles and the 
Jutes in the peninsula (now, in part, Denmark) which lies 
immediately to the north. The three tribes, while politi- 
cally distinct, came of the same stock, spoke the same 
language, and held to the same customs and beliefs. 
Cheerless and savage as this northern wilderness seemed 
to Tacitus, beside the unclouded sunshine and soft skies of 
Italy, it was yet well fitted to be the cradle of a strong race. 
Fierce storms from the North Sea drove down upon its 
sunken coasts, then unprotected by dyke or sea-wall, 
flooding their shoals and winding inlets, and overflowing 
the desolate island tracts of marsh and pool. Dismal cur- 
tains of fog settled down upon it; its tangled forests were 
soaked and dripping with frequent rains. Here it was a 
man's lot to suffer cold, hardship, and tempest; here he 
learned to face and to defy the perils of the sea; here, to 
live at all he must live bravely and hardily, fighting for his 
place. So, on land and sea, the English were trained and 
disciplined in a school for heroes. 

These early English were a fierce, rude folk. Hunters, 
farmers, and sailors, they were, above all, fighters by 

land and by sea. They were sea-robbers, like 
character ^heir kinsmen the Danes, and their high- 

prowed war-ships were a menace and a terror 
to the richer coast settlements far to the southward. For 
nearly a century before they actually settled in Britain, 
they harried and plundered its western coast. Their 
attacks were often as sudden as they were terrible, for, 
despising danger, they sometimes landed in the midst of a 
tempest, so that their approach could not be seen from a 
distance, and their victims might be caught unprepared. 1 
They are likened to eager wolves urged forward by 

1 We are told this by Sidonius Apollinaris, a bishop of the fifth cen- 
tury, who lived in the Roman province of Gaul. Epist. viii. 6 



18 TO NORMAN CONQUEST 

the scent of their prey. 1 This comradeship of the Eng- 
lish with the sea left its mark upon their early poetry. 
There we see the sailor at the prow watching in cold and 
darkness for the dreaded rocks, his feet stiff with the 
bitter frost; we watch the storm fling the great surges 
against the cliffs; we hear the scream of the 
??! 5!?!?? sea-bird : we hear the tern, her feathers crusted 

and the sea. t ; > 

with ice, answer the howl of the storm-wind 
against the rocks. 2 It is almost always the wilder and 
fiercer aspects of the sea that are brought before us in these 
descriptions. Not the calm blue depths of the Southern 
waters, but the very sea that the English Vikings knew 
and conquered; the dull-hued waste of the Northern 
ocean, full of perils to be fought and to be overcome. 

These English were large men, big-boned and muscular, 
with ruddy faces, fair hair, and blue or grey eyes. They 
were hard men, with something of the primitive savage 
yet in them; strong but untamed; huge feeders and deep 
drinkers; quick to strike; bloody and cruel as well as 
adventurous and brave. Yet it is a great mistake to 
think of them as mere barbarians. There was a strain of 
nobility in them; they were the true forefathers of the 

Noble traits men wno were ^° ma ^ e England. If they had 
in the English some of the faults of youth, they had also its 
character. sp l e ndid freshness, vigour, and vitality. We 
do not really know them until we look beneath the sur- 
face of coarse revelry and bloodshed, and find those noble 
and redeeming traits that lay even then at the base of their 
national character. They were loyal. The thegns, or 
chosen followers of the king or chief, were required to be 
faithful, and, if needs be, to lay down their lives for their 
lord. They were brave and self-reliant; and honour, as they 

1 Sidonius Apollinaris, Carm. vii. 

2 See the early poem of The Seafarer, given in Morley's English 
Writers, ii. 2K 



THE EARLY ENGLISH. 21 

hero of our oldest English epic, is true to the spirit of his 
race when he cries before his last fight: "To us it shall be 
as our Wyrd betides, that Wyrd is every man's lord." * The 
cruelty of this inexorable fate and the passing of all human 
things, are the chief themes of one of the early English 
poems, The Wanderer. The speaker tells us in his opening 
words, that he must tread the paths of exile because Fate 
has decreed it, "Wyrd is full fixed." At its close, after 
a passionate outcry over the ruin which has overtaken the 
mighty works of men, and a lament for all the dead joys 
and glories of the past, he concludes : 

"All the realm of earth is full of hardship; 
Wyrd's decree changes the world beneath the heavens; 
Here wealth passes away, here friend passes away, 
Here man passes away, here woman passes away, 
All the earth's structure becomes empty." 2 

Again and again in this early poetry the thought recurs, 
and we feel sure that it is no mere poetical adornment, but 
the expression of a feeling at the heart of the English 
nature. 

The mighty works of men's hands, the joy of the feast and 
of the harp, the strong warrior, all these pass into the great 
Continuity shadow and are as though they had not been. 3 
of the spirit The same stoical resignation to fate is found 
utwafure 1 * n ^ ne literature of the Northern nations akin to 
the English. The Scandinavian poet sings in 
the same spirit as his English kinsman : " We have gotten 

1 Beowulf, 1. 2525. 

2 The Wanderer, translated by Israel Gollancz in the edition of 
the Exeter Book published by the Early English Text Society. Miss 
Emily H. Hickey's translation, a more spirited but less literal render- 
ing, is given in Translations from Old English Poetry, by Cook and 
Tinker. 

3 This thought recurs in a striking passage in Carlyle: v. passage 
beginning, "That warrior on his strong war-horse," etc. in Sartor 
Resartus, Bk. iii. chap, viii., and cf. Pancoast's Stand. Eng. Prose, 
p. 641, n. 344. 



22 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

a good report though we die to-day or to-morrow. No man 
can live over the evening when the word of the Norns (Fates) 
has gone forth." 1 From the seventh century to the twen- 
tieth, English literature expresses the fundamental traits of 
the English character, and we appreciate the full force 
of this only when we see for ourselves how the spirit of 
these founders of England animates the literature of their 
descendants. The famous lines of an English poet of the 
seventeenth century express, though in a more polished 
form, the thought of these rude singers of a thousand years 
before : 

" The glories of our blood and state 
Are shadows, not substantial things; 
There is no armour against fate ; 
Death lays his icy hand on kings. " * 

And indeed it is the same mood that finds its greatest 
expression in the words of Shakespeare: 

" We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
•Is rounded with a sleep. " 3 

The fact that such a mood was familiar to these heathen 
English, reveals to us something of the depth of their 
m . strong and reverent nature. These men, 

SftriQusnsss 

and reverence brooding on death and fate, were not mere sea- 

in English robbers, not mere fighters and feasters. Not- 
character. 

withstanding all their outward barbarism, they 

had within them a profound seriousness, an awe in the 
presence of the invisible and unknown. While they 
looked death in the face as "the necessary end/' they con- 
fronted it steadily and boldly, and with no weak com- 
plaint. Nor did their haunting sense of the shortness of 

1 Hamdismal (or the Lay of Hamther) Corpus Poeticum Boreale, 
vol. i. 59. 

2 A Dirge, by James Shirley (1659). 
9 The Tempest, Act iv. Sc. 1. 



THE BRITONS. 23 

life produce in them the ordinary resolve to enjoy to-day 
to the full; it rather strengthened their desire to quit 
themselves like men. The English conscience speaks in 
such lines as these: 

"This is best laud from the living 
In last words spoken about him : — 
He worked ere he went his way, 
When on earth, 'gainst the wiles of the foe, 
With brave deeds overcoming the devil. " x 

So in studying these early English we look back to the 
rock from which a great race was hewn. We recognise 
in them those traits of mind and character that in the 
centuries to come took shape in the deeds of heroes and 
the songs of poets. In these half -savage pirate-tribes, 
with the deep northern melancholy, is the germ of that 
masterful and aggressive nation which was to put a girdle 
of English round the world. Of this blood are the sea- 
dogs who chased the towering galleons of the Spanish 
Armada, the Six Hundred who charged to their death at 
Balaclava, or those other English, who declared and 
maintained their inheritance of freedom in new lands. 
The spirit of this older England, enriched by time, is 
alive, too, in the works of Shakespeare, of Milton, and of 
Browning, as it is in the deeds of Raleigh, of Nelson, of 
Chatham, and of Gordon. 

The Britons. 

When the English settled in Britain, the British Isles 
were possessed by a number of tribes belonging to the 
Celtic race. Scotland and Ireland were occupied by 
tribes belonging to one great branch or division of this 
race, the Goidels, or Gaels, and the country afterwards 
known as England by another, the Brythons, or Britons. 

1 The Seafarer, Morley's translation, English Writers, vol. ii. p. 24. 



24 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

Mingled with this Celtic population of Britain were the 
descendants of an entirely different race, whose ancestors 
the Celtic invaders had found in possession and subdued. 
But although the inhabitants were not all pure Celts, the 
Celts were everywhere uppermost, and when the English 
conquered Britain, they got a foothold in a cluster of 
islands filled with the Celtic spirit from the western coast 
of Ireland to the eastern shores of Britain, and from the 
Hebrides to the Land's End. That conquest, therefore, 
took the Englishman out of the land of the Teuton, where 
his neighbors were men of his own race, and set him 
down in the land of the Celt. The Celtic temperament 
was very different from the English, and the English 
people were thus brought under new influences that were 
destined to enter then life and literature through many 
channels and to modify them in many ways. It is, there- 
fore, important for us to know something of the race that 
was thus grafted on the original English stock. Although 

the Celts somewhat resembled the English in 
and Celt. appearance, the character of the race was very 

different. The English of to-day are a practical, 
capable race; they excel in statesmanship, in com- 
merce; they shrink from any open display of their feel- 
ings; they are stronger in deeds than in words. These 
traits they have inherited from their Teutonic fore- 
fathers. Now, the Celtic temperament was the very 
reverse of this, for the Celt was, above all, emotional, a 
creature of impulse. He had that excitable, sensitive 
nature, that keen delight in whatever is beautiful or 
tragic, pathetic or grotesque, which we associate with the 
poet, the painter, the musician. Swept onward by a 
rush of feeling, the Celt could be brave to the point of 
rashness, but when the time for steady endurance came, 
he lacked the dogged tenacity of the English, the stub- 
born persistence that so often turns defeat to victory. 



THE BRITONS. 25 

The Celts, we are told, would attack the enemy with a 
reckless fury; but, if repulsed, their retreat often changed 
quickly into a panic-stricken flight. This sudden change 
of mood is characteristic of the impulsive Celt. His feel- 
ings were violent but transitory, and he passed easily from 
tears to laughter, or from hope to despair. The French, 
who are largely Celtic, have a similar lightness and in- 
stability of temperament; and the Irish, ready to fight, 
jest, or weep, show the same lack of steadfastness and 
self-control. But if the Celts were inferior to the English 
in certain solid qualities, they were quicker-witted, more 
fanciful, less ponderous and matter-of-fact. The spirit 
of the early English resembled those sombre northern 

solitudes that were the home of the race; but 
of colour! 6 ^he Celt loved brightness, colour, and sunshine. 

The plaid, with its ingeniously varied com- 
bination of colours, is the badge of the Celt, found alike 
among the Gauls of the Continent, the various tribes of 
Britain, and the clans of Scotland and Ireland. The 
Britons loved glittering ornaments; they delighted in 
torques, or collars of twisted gold, in bracelets, and strings 
of bright coloured beads; their chiefs were glorious in shining 
helmets, corselets, and shields. This passion of the Celt 
for brilliant and contrasted colours lights up his literature 
with a richness and splendour not found in that of the early 
English. When a Celtic poet wished to bring an object 
vividly before his hearers, he dwelt on its colour rather 
than on its form. In the following descriptions, one taken 
from an early Irish epic, the other from a collection of 
Welsh stories, we can hardly fail to be impressed with the 
love of colour and the love of Nature so apparent in both : 

"Her soft hands were as white as the snow of a single night, and her 
eyes as blue as any blue flower, and her lips as red as the berries of the 
rowan-tree, and her body as white as the foam of the wave." 1 

1 Gods and Fighting Men, the story of the Tuatha De Danaan and of the 
Fianna of Ireland, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory, p. 91. 



26 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

The second description is written in much the same 
style : 

"The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about 
her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds 
and rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, 
and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were 
her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone 
amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained 
hawk, the glance of the three-mewed falcon, was not brighter than 
hers. Whoso beheld her was filled with her love. Four white trefoils 
sprung up wherever she trod. " 1 

With this love of colour the love of Nature was closely 

associated. The Celtic poet and romancer loved 

of Nature! ^ ne beauty and the brightness of the world 

about him, the cheerful sunshine, the vivid hues 

of the flowers, the songs of the birds. 

In early English poetry, Nature is usually brought before 
us in her more cheerless and savage moods. We are shown 
the haunted pool in the depth of the forest, 2 the windy 
headland, the angry seas; whereas in many of the Celtic 
poems, as in the following Irish song of love and spring, 
Nature is, beautiful and friendly, and we hear not the 
"scream of the gannet," 3 but the song of the cuckoo in the 
spring woods. 

"May time, delightful time! How beautiful the colour! the black- 
birds sing their full lay; would that Laighaig were here! The 
cuckoos sing in constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble 
brilliance of the seasons! On the margin of the branching woods the 
summer swallows skim the stream; . . . the sea is lulled to rest, 
flowers cover the earth." * 

1 Kilhwch and Olwen, Guest's Mabinogion, Dent's ed. p. 127. The 
poetic fancy at the close is a characteristic touch of Celtic sentiment, 
and is marked by a delicacy to which the cruder and less pliant 
strength of the early English could hardly attain. 

2 See the famous description in Beowulf, 1. 1357, partially para- 
phrased on p. 40. 

3 The Seafarer, see p. 18, supra. 

4 This is taken from an early Irish poem of uncertain date. It is? 
quoted by Dr. Hyde in his Literary History of Ireland, p. 275. 



THE BRITONS. 27 

These two peculiarities, the love of colour, and the love of 
natural beauty, continue to mark Celtic literature through- 
out its later history. 

To these traits the Celt added that peculiar delicacy and 
tenderness of feeling, that fresh and poetic susceptibility to 
the finer emotions, which is best described by the 
thnent Sen " wor d sentiment. Sentiment, according to a great 
critic, is the distinguishing mark of the Celtic 
nature. Not only was the Celt emotional, he delighted in 
his emotions with the delight of the artist and the poet. 
His strong imagination, his deep sense of the wonder of all 
things, brought him very near to the invisible and the 
unknown. He lived on the borderland of a world of 
mystery, and his belief in unseen powers is shown in in- 
numerable myths and superstitions. 

In addition to the greater deities, the Britons recognised 
a multitude of supernatural beings of an inferior order, 
such as good and bad fairies, giants and demons. So 
deeply rooted were these popular superstitions, that in those 
parts of England which were the last stronghold of the Celt 
we find some lingering traces of them even to this day. 

There were many reasons why the Celts should produce 
an abundant literature. They were more demonstrative 
than the English, they had the temperament of 
literature ^e artist, and the power of putting their feelings 
into words. They loved to tell or to hear stories ; 
and the Bard, or poet, held an honourable and important 
place among them. It was the Bard who preserved in his 
songs the memory of the past; it was the Bard who cele- 
brated the great deeds of heroes; and it was through his 
praise that a man's fame lived on to after times. Each 
of the three Celtic countries, Ireland, Scotland, and Bri- 
tain, had an extensive literature both in poetry and in 
prose, and in the remains of this literature we can see clearly 
the peculiar genius of the Celt. 



28 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

How far this settlement in the land of the Celt may have 
modified the English character, is a matter of dispute; but it 
is probable that the influence of the Celt upon 
o^theEngUsh 6 tne English has been much greater and more 
lasting than can be easily proved. It is true 
that during the early stages of the Conquest the mass of 
the Celtic population was forced slowly westward before the 
stubborn advance of their conquerors, leaving the eastern 
part of the island almost entirely English in its population. 
But it is also true that the west remained Celtic, and 
that its people preserved the language, literature, and 
traditions of their race. In some parts of the country, 
and particularly in that borderland between the Eastern 
English and the Western Celt, the two races gradually 
mingled, making a virtually new stock. To what extent 
this mixture took place is uncertain; but in any case, we 
know that English and Celt have continued to live within 
the limits of the same small island for more than fourteen 
hundred year^, and we know that Celtic story and legend, 
from Ireland and Scotland as well as from Cornwall and 
Wales, have been absorbed into English literature and have 
become a part of the spiritual heritage of the English race. 
We gain some idea of the strength of this unobtrusive and 
constant influence when we reflect that some of the popular 
customs and superstitions of the English were borrowed 
from the Celt. Some of their popular beliefs passed into 
literature, and were made use of by Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
Milton, and other great English poets. 1 Celtic poetry and 
legend have furnished subjects to English writers from a 
very early period down to our own day. The story of 
King Lear, the theme of one of Shakespeare's sublimest 
tragedies, was originally Celtic; the story of Locrine, like- 

1 For example, Mab, Queen of the Fairies, described by Shakes- 
peare in Romeo and Juliet, Act i. Sc. 4, and alluded to by Milton in 
V Allegro, belongs to Celtic mythology. Cf. also the allusion to 
Sabrina, p. 14, supra. 



THE BRITONS. 2£ 

wise of Celtic origin, has been retold by Swinburne, one of 
the great poets of the Victorian age; above all, the stories 
that cluster about the British King Arthur and his knights 
hold a high place in the national literature of England, 
and have been selected by Tennyson as the subject of one 
of his most ambitious poems. Nor is this all. There is 
good reason to believe that the spirit of English literature 
has been enriched and refined by the spirit of the Celt: 
fancy has been added to fact, and beauty and romance to 
moral earnestness and strength. 

It is not hard to see why this should have been the 
case. The union of English and Celt was a marriage of 
opposites, and the very differences between the 
and Celt. two races make them peculiarly helpful to one 
another. Each had something to give the 
other; each needed the other to complete its character, 
and the fusion of the two prepared the way for the tri- 
umphs of a later time. We can better understand this 
by remembering that William Shakespeare, the greatest 
genius of the modern world, was born in a district where 
the mixture of the two races was especially great, and 
that, by inheritance as by the quality of his genius, we 
may think of him as the highest example of the union of 
the Teuton and the Celt. "It is not without significance 
that the highest type of the race, the one Englishman who 
has combined in their largest measure the mobility and 
fancy of the Celt with the depth and energy of the Teu- 
tonic temper, was born on the old Welsh and English 
borderland, in the forest of Arden." * 

The Dane and the Norman shared with the Celt the 
task of making the modern English, but the coming of 
these invaders and its results belong to a later period in 
the story of the literature. 

1 J. R. Green, quoted in article on "Shakespeare" by Professor T 
Spencer Baynes, in Encyclopedia Britannica, ninth ed. 



30 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 



II ; The Geographical Position of England. 

The English people, fitted, as we have seen, by strength, 
courage, endurance, and integrity, to play a leading part 
in history, were placed by their conquest of Britain in a 
situation peculiarly favourable to the growth of their great 
qualities. Not only were they thus brought in contact 
with the Celts, a people wonderfully prepared to give 
them what they most needed, but they also became 
masters of an island especially fitted to be the centre of a 
great world-power. The English, when they conquered 
Britain, were the right race in the right place. Had they 
remained on the Continent they could hardly have main- 
tained a separate national existence. In all likelihood, 
these three Low-German tribes, hemmed in by a great 
Germanic population, must have sooner or later been lost 
to history, like their neighbours the Frisians, in the life of 
some larger state. But by their conquest of an island 
they interposed a strip of sea between them and Conti- 
nental interference, and that sea became, as Shakespeare 
has said, "like a moat defensive to a house." Here in 
their island-fortress, protected, but not entirely exempt 
from foreign invasion, they were far enough away from 
Continental influences to live their own lives and embody 
their own nationality in literature without serious hind- 
rance. 

Yet such were the peculiar advantages of the geo- 
graphical position of England that, while the English were 
sufficiently cut off from Europe to preserve their in- 
dividuality and to grow according to the natural bent of 
their genius, they were not so estranged as to 
of England's lose the benefit of contact with the European 
geographical civilisation. We see this more clearly if we 
contrast the position of the English with that 
of certain of their Teutonic kindred who established them- 



POSITION OF ENGLAND. 31 

selves in Iceland and in Northern France some centuries 
after the conquest of Britain. The Scandinavian bands, 
which early in the ninth century possessed themselves 
of Iceland, were set apart in a region too remote from the 
centres of the world's life for their fullest development. 
That lonely northern island was too isolated, too bleak, 
and too barren, to be the seat of a world-power. And as 
Iceland was too far, so Normandy, settled in the tenth 
century by other roving bands of Teutons, was too near. 
In Normandy the Northman almost lost his identity 
under the pressure of the strange influences that sur- 
rounded him; he learned new things quickly; he adopted 
a foreign language, foreign customs and ideas. Moreover, 
the land, which the Norman had won, was hemmed in on 
three sides by the territories of France; and, shut in by 
that great power, the Duchy of Normandy was finally 
absorbed by the kingdom of which it was naturally a part. 
Nearer than Iceland, yet farther off than Normandy, 
the intermediate situation of England preserved her alike 
from the disadvantages of isolation and from the dangers 
of a too close contact. She has been repeatedly stimu- 
lated and enlightened by influences which have reached 
her from the Continent, — by Christianity, scholarship, 
literature, architecture, and art, — and these influences 
have been strong enough at times to make an era in her 
intellectual and literary life. Yet, while she has learned 
much from the civilisation of the Continent, the strong 
original traits of the English character have remained 
essentially the same. The genius of England has often 
changed what she has received from without into a new 
thing; she has been improved but not radically changed 
by the world beyond her borders; there has been no serious 
interference with the growth of her powers, and she has 
kept that independence of mind which has set her apart 
from other nations. The geographical position of Eng- 



32 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

land has consequently been an important factor in the 
making of her literature; it has helped to make that 
literature truly national; it has kept the English genius 
faithful to the past, and forced it, at the same time, to learn 
from the present; it has given it both opportunity and 
liberty. 

III. The Making of the Litebatubb. 

We do not know just when or how English literature 
began. Its foundations were laid in the obscurity of a 
_ far-off past, long before Angle, Jute, and Saxon 
ning of had left their old home on the Continent . We 
English have no knowledge of a time when the English 
had not their poets and their songs, their 
myths and their wonderful stories of heroes; and these 
accumulated stores of popular poetry and legend they 
brought with them to their new home in Britain. It is 
true that this mass of song and story was literature only in 
the broadest sense, for it was unwritten, 1 and preserved, 
if preserved at all, only in the memories of the poets and 
of the people themselves. We must think of this earliest 
literature of the English not as anything which belonged 
to one favoured class, not as something locked up in books 
or parchments, but as the common inheritance of the 
whole people. Children learned these ancient songs and 
stories from their parents; and the younger gleemen, or 
minstrels, sang to the harp many lays that had been 
handed down to them from the singers who had come 

1 From very early times the English, in common with the Scan- 
dinavians, used an alphabet, the letters of which are supposed by 
some to have been derived from the alphabet of the Greeks. It seems 
probable, however, that the English only used this runic-writing for 
the short inscriptions on sword-hilts and the like, and not for any dis- 
tinctly literary purpose. Their literature was, so far as we know, 
composed and preserved without the use of letters, and such early 
English poems or fragments as have survived were reduced to writing 
at a later time. 



THE LITERATURE. 33 

before them. These old songs they altered, perhaps, in 
language or substance, or, it may be, they added new 
songs of their own; and, then, in their turn, handed 
both the new songs and the old to their successors. We 
can easily understand that a poem which has thus grown 
by frequent repetition through successive generations of 
singers, has neither author nor date, for it is not the work 
of any one time. So it comes about that no one can say 
when or by whom a great part of this poetry of the early 
English was composed, and so it is that we often find lines 
that come to us straight from the old world of heathenism 
and lines that are distinctly Christian side by side in the 
same poem. 

We live in such a different world that it is not easy for 
us to realise how large a place poetry filled in the daily 
The large life of the people. It stirred men to patriotism 

place of an( j £ Drave deeds, for it kept alive and glori- 

poetry among . 

the early fied the memories of the past ; and the warrior 
English. w h heard with pride of the triumphs of his 
fathers, 1 oped that the remembrance of his victories also 
would survive in song. When the leader sat with his 
followers in the great feast-hall, when the fire blazed on 
the hearth, and the cups of mead were passed around, these 
men rough and roving, and cruel as they doubtless were, 
loved to listen to the gleeman's celebration of their chief- 
tain's daring, and fight their battles over again in his song. 
Nor was it the gleeman only, the professional poet or 
harper, who sang; the warrior, the sailor, the farmer, 
chanted crude verses of war and glory, as the harp was 
passed from hand to hand that every one might sing in 
turn. Nor was song invoked only in hours of ease. It is 
probable that the English, like the other {xerman tribes, 
raised their harsh, terrifying battle-hymn as they rushed 
forward to the conflict, increasing the din and confused 
tumult of sound, as was the German fashion, by holding 



34 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

their shields closer to their mouths that the reverberation 
might intensify the sound. 1 

Poetry was also closely associated with religion. 
Indeed, this very song before battle was in part a religious 
ritej and the soldier saw in it a mystic augury of victory 
or defeat. 

Poetry was part, too, of the every-day labours of peace. 
The farmer in the field invoked the great creative powers 
of nature with a solemn song, or hymn : 

"Erce, Erce. Erce, mother of Earth. 
May the Almighty, the Eternal Lord, grant thee 
Fields fertile and nourishing, 
Fruitful and full of vigour. 

Well be it with thee, Earth the mother of men! " J 

There is a charm to keep bees from deserting the hive; 
a charm to be used when land had been bewitched or when 
it was unfruitful. In the same way men joined religion 
and poetry and called them to their aid in a charm against 
rheumatic, or other pains, which were supposed to come 
from the invisible dart or spear of witches. 3 After the 
English became Christian, the Chinch changed many of 
these old heathen charms and songs, or introduced new 
and entirely Christian poetry in their place. They were so 
closely associated with the old heathen beliefs that a 
Canon of the Church in the days of King Edgar, in the 
latter half of the tenth century, forbade the singing of 

1 Tacitus. Germania, Ch. 3. " Adfectatur praecipue asperitas soni 
et fractum murmur, obiectis ad os scutis, quo plenior et gravior vox 
repercussu intumescat. 

2 Cook and Tinker's Trans, from Old Eng. Poetry, 166-67, gives 
this and other similar charms. These charms contain Christian ele- 
ments that belong of course to a later date, but portions of them are 
evidently survivals of the old heathen rites, and belong to a very 
early period. 

3 This curious charm is also given in Cook and Tinker, but for an 
interesting comment on it see Gummere's Germanic Origins, p. 372 f. 



THE LITERATURE. 35 

" heathen songs " on the great religious festivals. 1 Yet much 
of this poetry was remembered and cherished among 
the people, and by some at least of the best Christian 
scholars and teachers. Bede (673-735), the great monk- 
scholar of Northumbria, was well-skilled in the English 
songs, and recited some English verses on his death-bed ; 
a contemporary of Bede, Bishop Aldhelm, although he 
wrote much in Latin did not neglect the native poetry of 
his own tongue; as a child King Alfred, nearly two cen- 
turies later, learned the songs of his people, " which he 
often heard recited," 2 and Alfred's children, we are told, 
learned " especially the Saxon poems;" 3 still later, in the 
tenth century, St. Dunstan, the famous Archbishop of 
Canterbury, is reported to have "loved the vain songs 
of ancient heathendom, the trifling legends, and the funeral 
chants." 4 So the more closely we look into the matter, 
the more we are impressed with the important place held 
by literature, and especially by poetry, in the early life 
of the English people; we see that poetry was present on 
the farm, in the battle, at the sick-bed and at the feast; 
that it was loved by the plain people and the scholars; 
that children learned it from their parents, and that the 
aged saint chanted on his death-bed the words of an 
English song. 

But although the national songs belonged to the people 
and were loved and sung by them, there was also among the 

English a distinct class of men who devoted them- 
an?sc6p. selves to the making or reciting of poetry. There 

were two kinds of professional poets or singers : 
first the scdp, that is, the shaper, or maker, of verse; 

1 "And we enjoin, that on feast days heathen songs and devil's 
games be abstained from." Thorpe's Ancient Laws and Institutes of 
England, ii. p. 249. 

3 Asser's Life of Alfred, Six Old English Chronicles. Bonn's ed. p. 51. 

3 lb. p. 68. 

4 Quoted in Gummere's Germanic Origins, 470. 



36 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

and second, the gleeman, or harper. The scop, 1 as his name 
implies, was above all the poet, that is, the composer or in- 
ventor of songs, although he also chanted or recited them: 
he was generally attached to the household of some king 
or chieftain, but he sometimes wandered from land to land, 
a welcome guest at a feast. The gleeman, 2 on the contrary, 
was not distinctly a maker but a singer or reciter of poems, 
and he consequently held a less dignified position than the 
scop. He was the merry-maker, and at an early period of 
English history, he seems to have been jester, acrobat, and 
juggler, as well as a singer. 3 

Two very early poems, Widsith and the Complaint of 
Deor, not improbably of Continental origin, reveal to us 
something of the varying life and fortunes cf 
and the those early singers. In both of these the poet 
Complaint speaks in the first person and gives us an appar- 
ently true account of his own experiences. Wid- 
sith, or, as we should say, the wide-wanderer, or jar-traveller, 41 
recounts his wanderings through many lands; he tells how 
he sang in many hails, how he was praised, and how men of 
high rank gave him rich gifts for his songs. Always, he 
says, north or south, the singer finds a welcome. Always 
he finds some one, open-handed in his gifts, who appreciates 
song, and looks to it to magnify his fame and keep it in 
lasting remembrance. The Complaint of Deor shows us, 
that then, as now, the artistic life had its bitter disappoint- 

1 Scop, from A. S. scieppan, to shape, make, or fashion (cf. Ger. 
schaffen), creation being generally recognised as the supreme faculty 
of the poet, or maker (Gr. xot^r^s = a maker, Toielv = to make). 

2 Gleeman, from Anglo-Saxon Gleoman, music-man, or harper. Gleo 
means fun, mirth, amusement, as well as music. See the various 
uses of the modern glee in the Cent. Diet. 

3 See Strutt's Sports and Pastimes, p. 251. 

4 Anglo-Saxon, wid = wide, extended; sith = going, motion, way, 
road, etc. The first meaning of Widsith is consequently a long journey; 
the second, one who takes such a journey > a traveller in many 
lands* 



THE LITERATURE. 37 

ments as well as its rewards. Deor was not a wandering 
singer: he belonged to a chief's household, and was " dear 
to his lord/' until supplanted by a rival. The poet schools 
himself to endure the evil that has come upon him, and for- 
tifies himself by remembering the others who have endured 
sorrow: " this man/' he says, " overcame, and so may I." 
This is the refrain of the poem and its dominant note. It 
has the true English ring, for it is the note of a manly for- 
titude and not of a weak complaint. 

Among these relics of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Beowulf, a 
crude but vigorous epic of more than three thousand lines, 

wnif easily holds the first place. It has, indeed, more 
than a national importance, for it is the oldest 
surviving epic of any Teutonic people, older than the sagas, 
or stories, of the Scandinavians, older than the German 
epic, the Nibelungen Lied, or song of the Nibelungs. Nor 
is it in Teutonic literature alone that it is remarkable, for 
it is far older than the great epics and romances of the 
Middle Ages; older than the Song of ftoland, the Norman- 
French Chanson (or song) of the great knight of Charle- 
magne; older than the poem of the Cid, the romance which 
celebrated the valour of the early national hero, or cham- 
pion of Spain. We may say, therefore, without exaggera- 
tion, that Beowulf stands in an impressive, if not in an 
unique, relation to the literature of modern Europe. 

Apart from what we can gather or infer from our study 
of the work itself, we know almost nothing definite about 
this venerable poem. We do not know who was 
the^poem. ^s author, nor are we certain just when or where 
it was composed. We need not concern our- 
selves here with the many speculations to which this un- 
certainty has given rise; we will confine ourselves to what 
is apparent or reasonably certain. The poem shows clearly 
a mingling of different elements. Part of it appears to be 
purely or largely mythical or legendary, part of it again 



38 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

seems to have grown out of actual history. It is essen- 
tially heathen; yet it contains passages that show an ac- 
quaintance with the Bible. The monster Grendel, for in- 
stance, a demon of the waters and fen ; although plainly a 
creature of the old heathendom, is yet said to be descended 
from Cain, the first murderer. It seems probable, there- 
fore, that it was not entirely the work of one man; but that 
it grew by frequent repetition; and that sagas, myths, and 
historic facts were gradually mingled together and shaped 
into an epic form. The scene of the poem is laid on the 
Continent somewhere near the old home of the English, 
and Beowulf is not an Englishman but the Prince of a Teu- 
tonic tribe called the Geats. But the English appear to 
have shaped the story as we know it, and scholars think 
that the poem took its present form in the north of Eng- 
land, in Northumbria or in Mercia, sometime during the 
seventh or eighth centuries. 

One thing, at least, seems clear, — the close relation 

between the literature of the early English which Beowulf 

represents, and that of the Englishman's Teu- 

its relation tonic neighbours and kinsfolk. The dwellers in 

to other Teu- . ° . 

tonic poems, the Scandinavian peninsula, or in the depths 

of the German forests, were men of the same 

blood as the English. They looked on life in much the 

same way; and innumerable similarities, in speech, religion, 

and manners, show them to be all sprung from the same 

stock. This similarity, this common origin, is likewise 

shown in literature. Beowulf is truly an English epic, 

but in a wider sense it is a Teutonic epic, for it belongs to 

a group of poems produced by other branches of the 

same race-stock. 1 The Teuton in Scandinavia, Iceland, 

1 Critics have called attention to the interest which the Anglo- 
Saxon showed in the heroic sagas of other Teutonic tribes, "a fact 
which indicates a lively intercourse with the various Teutonic tribes 
of the Continent: " De La Saussaye, The Religion of the Teutons, p. 154. 



THE LITERATURE. 39 

and Germany, had likewise his stories of heroes, his 
legends of great fighters like the Icelandic champion Grettir 
the Strong, or Sigurd, whom the Germans called Siegfried. 
Grettir, like Beowulf, rid a dwelling of a horrible monster, 
overcoming him by the mighty grip of his bare hands: 
Siegfried, like Beowulf, fought and slew a fiery dragon, 
guardian of a fabulous horde of treasure. 1 The resem- 
blance is not founded merely on a similarity of incident ; 
the early English literature is akin in spirit to the other 
literatures of the Teutonic north. Beowulf is our English 
hero-saga. These facts are important; they mean that 
English literature is in its origin essentially and funda- 
mentally Teutonic. Like the Scandinavian, the Ice- 
landic, it comes out of that wonderland of the north; dark, 
reticent, and cruel, but deep-hearted, true, and strong, 
and however softened and enlivened by a mingling with 
the Celt, however deeply influenced by the Latin civili- 
sation of France and Italy, it remains at heart Northern 
and Teutonic throughout all its changing history. 

Beowulf is a poem of battle ; the battle of a man against 
three monstrous and mysterious incarnations of the powers 

of evil. The poem naturally divides itself into 
the poem. ° thi*ee parts, the central interest in each part 

being the life and death struggle between the 
hero and some supernatural adversary. Hrothgar, a 
Danish king, builds for himself a splendid mead-hall, 
Heorot, wherein he sits feasting with his thegns. A 
fiendish monster, Grendel, lurking in the dark marshes 
without, is tortured by the sounds of minstrelsy that 
reach him from the hall. In jealous hate he enters Heorot 

1 There is also in Beowulf a direct reference to the slaying of the 
dragon by Siegfried, but the adventure is ascribed not to Siegfried 
but to his father Siegmund. The story is told by a thane, or noble, 
who knew many old sagas, and who was skilful in telling them. See 
Beowulf, 1. 867. 



40 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

by night and slays thirty sleeping companions of the king. 
Again and again he comes to destroy, until the splendid 
hall has to be forsaken. After twelve years Beowulf, a 
prince of the Geats, or Goths, endowed with the strength 
of thirty men, comes with his followers in a ship to rid 
Hrothgar of this scourge. He is made welcome, and that 
night he and his band occupy the hall. All are asleep 
save Beowulf when Grendel strides into the hall, his eyes 
glowing like flames. He snatches a warrior, rends him to 
pieces, and greedily devours him. Then he attacks 
Beowulf, and they close in deadly grapple, the hero using 
no weapon, but trusting solely in his mighty strength. 
The stanch hall trembles with the fierceness of the contest ; 
the massive benches are splintered; the Danes stand 
around, panic-stricken. Then Grendel, howling, strives 
to escape, but Beowulf crushes him with his terrible hand- 
grip. At length the demon, with the loss of an arm, 
wrenches himself free, and flies to the fens to die. On 
the morrow .all crowd round Beowulf, rejoicing; but the 
next night Grendel's mother comes to avenge her son, 
and carries off one of the thegns. Beowulf resolves to 
conquer this new foe. With his thegns he tracks the 
woman-fiend over murky moors, through rocky gorges, 
and by the haunts of the water-nixies, until he comes upon 
a stagnant pool, frothing with blood and overhung by 
gloomy trees. By night the waters are livid with flame. 
The deer, pursued by dogs, will die on the bank rather 
than tempt those unsounded depths. It is a place of 
terror. Beowulf plunges in and fights the water-fiend in 
her cave under the flood. His sword proves useless 
against her. Again he trusts to sheer strength. "So it 
behooves a man to act when he thinks to attain enduring 
praise; — he will not be caring for his life." Beowulf 
falls, and the fiend is above him, her knife drawn. Then 
the hero snatches from a pile of arms a mighty sword, 



THE LITERATURE. 41 

giant-forged, and slays his adversary. Again there is 
mirth and praise at Heorot. 

In the last part of the poem Beowulf has become King 
of the Goths and has ruled over them for fifty winters. 
At this time the land is worried by a dragon, who sets 
men's homes aflame with his fiery breath. The dragon's 
lair is near a wild headland at whose front the sea breaks ; 
here Beowulf seeks him and gives battle, trusting " in the 
strength of his single manhood." The old king is again 
victorious, but is mortally hurt. He bids a follower bring 
out the dragon's treasure hoard, and as the glistening 
gold and jewels are spread on the grass, he gives thanks 
that he has won them for his people. So Beowulf dies, 
and a lofty mound is raised in his honour on the high cliff, 
which sailors, in voyaging upon the deep, could behold 
from far. The poem ends in a requiem of praise: 

"Lamented thus 
The loyal Goths, 
Their chieftain's fall, 
Hearth-fellows true ; — 
They said he was, 
Of all kings in the world, 
Mildest to his men 
And most friendly, 
To his lieges benignest, 
And most bent upon glory. " 

Something of the poem's spirit makes itself felt even 
through this meagre summary. We catch something of 
its profound earnestness, its gloom, its simple- 
th^poem. minded intensity. Beowulf, the one central 
figure, moves before us in heroic proportions. In 
his courtesy, his vast strength, his quiet courage, his self- 
reliance, his submission to fate, he may stand as the 
pattern of the early English ideal of manhood, as Achilles 
of the early Greek. The story is relieved by few gentler 
touches. As a background to this life of conflict, Nature 



42 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

rises before us, harsh, sombre, pitiless, alive with super- 
stitious terrors, dreary amid the remoteness and savagery 
of the northern solitudes. 

The prevailing gloom is hardly ever lifted; there is none 
of the Celtic delight in the splendour of glowing colours ; no 
thought of yielding to ease or pleasure; none of that 
supreme delight in beauty which fills so large a place in 
the world's art. No story of love, no touch of romantic 
tenderness, gives grace or softness to the stern but enno- 
bling record ; this is a man's world, and all is tense and 
stark. Beowulf, about to set out against Grendel's mother, 
comforts Hrothgar in the most matter-of-fact manner and 
with a true English reticence in the expression of emotion. 
"Sorrow not," he exclaims; "it is better one should avenge 
his friend than mourn for him long. Each of us must 
abide life's end in this world." * It is true that there are 
hours of rejoicing; but while the lighted mead-hall echoes 
with song and cheer, about it lie the black wastes, the 
haunts of demons. Such a tone suits best with the un- 
flinching courage, the uncompromising morality, which 
thrill through the poem. Life may not be a pleasant 
thing; it may be made a noble thing. "He who has the 
chance should work mighty deeds before he die; that is 
for a mighty man the best memorial." 2 The ideal em- 
bodied in the life of this early English hero anticipates 
by a thousand years the spirit of the noble precept of the 
great Puritan : 

"Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv'st 
Live well; how long or short permit to Heaven." 3 

Courage, fortitude, self-sacrifice, these things are pre- 
ferred to the pleasures of the senses, even to life itself. 

1 Beowulf, 1. 1384. C. G. Child's trans., Riverside Literature Series, 
p. 38. 

a Beowulf, 11. 1387-1390. 

8 Paradise Lost, Bk. xi. 1. 553. 



THE LITERATURE. 43 

There was good stuff in these English even while they 
were yet heathen. There is little display of sentiment, 
but a downright, matter-of-fact heroism; little grace or 
flexibility, but a sheer if somewhat clumsy strength. 
As we study Beowulf, we see that it is all unconsciously 
the epic of the origin of a great race; for it shows us the 
material out of which the English were hewn. This, in- 
deed, is perhaps its highest merit. To some its story may 
seem commonplace, its characters stereotyped or con- 
ventional; but we must all agree that, whatever it may 
lack, Beowulf has a lasting interest and value as a picture 
of life and manners. Wherever the scene may be laid, 
wherever the story may have originated, Beowulf was 
shaped by Englishmen, and it reveals the English character 
and ideals. In it the English of the fifth or sixth centuries 
still think, and speak, and act : — in the boat, in the 
fight, or in the hall, "in habit as they lived." This alone 
would make it a priceless possession, for we can say as we 
read it, " It was by such men as these that the foundation 
of England was laid." 

Beowulf and the other very early poems are essentially 
heathen; for the insertion of some Christian reflection or 
The effect of fusion, introduced, perhaps, by some monkish 
Christianity transcriber, does not change their real character. 
on terature. -g u ^ a ^. ^ e ^ me j mmec ii a t e ly preceding the 

introduction of Christianity, English heathenism seems to 
have largely consisted in the absence of any vital and 
definite religious belief. Old superstitions are indeed 
present in these early poems: we hear of nickers (A. S. 
nicor), or water-sprites, eotens, or giants, of dragons and 
demons, but little or nothing of the gods or of a life 
hereafter. The real ruler of man's life is not Odin, or 
Thor, but Fate. 1 The truth seems to be that the English 
had outgrown the crude mythology of an earlier time, 

1 See pp. 20-21, supra. 



44 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

that belief in it had become half-hearted or formal. When 
Christianity was first preached in Northumbria, the chief 
priest himself advised the king to listen to the new teach- 
ing, "for/' he said, "I can assure you from my own ex- 
perience, that the religion we have heretofore professed 
has no virtue in it. " * These men were thinkers : they, too, 
could feel something of the burden and the mystery of a 
world that they could not understand, and they faced 
life and death with reverence but without fear. This 
spirit is often apparent in the early poetry. We find an 
admirable example of it in the speech of that heathen 
Ealdorman of Northumbria, in which he likened man's 
life to a sparrow which flies out of the wintry storm into a 
hall where men sit at a feast, and tarries but for a moment 
in the warmth and brightness, and flies out again into the 
cold and tempest beyond the little circle of light. 2 

The story shows us a man profoundly curious about 
the deepest questions of life, a man who has apparently 
put aside as inadequate the old notions of his forefathers 
about the future fife, and who is therefore able to regard 
the whole matter with a mind open to new ideas. Such, 
there is every reason to suppose, was the state of mind of 

1 Bede, Ecc, Hist. ii. xiiL 

3 The speech is given as follows by Bede in a justly famous passage: 
"The present life of man in this world, O King, seems to me, in com- 
parison to that time which is uncertain, as if a sparrow, swiftly flying 
through the room, warmed with the fire in the midst of it, in which 
you sit at dinner, in the winter, with your friends, whilst the storms of 
rain and snow prevail outside; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one 
window, and immediately out again at another, whilst it is within doors 
does not feel the inclemency of the weather, but, after a very short space 
of time, vanishes out of your sight, returning from one winter to another. 
So the life of man here appears for a very short space of time ; but of 
what went before or of what is to follow, we are entirely ignorant. 
If, therefore, this new doctrine contain something more certain, it 
seems to deserve our approbation and reception." Ecclesiastical 
History, Bk. ii. chap. xiii. ; v. also Wordsworth's rendering of this, 
Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Part i. xvi. 



THE LITERATURE. 45 

many of the English at this time. Deeply religious by 
nature, their old religion had lost its hold upon them, 
and they were prepared to welcome something new. 
This is one great reason why Christianity spread so quickly 
among them, and why it became such a strong motive 
force not only in their lives but in their literature. For 
nearly a century and a half after their first settlement in 
Britain, the English kept, at least outwardly, to the faith 
of their fathers. The Christian Church had already been 
planted in Britain, but the Britons were their enemies. 
Christian Europe lay to the eastward, Christian Ireland 
to the west; but the first business of the English was to 
wrest the land from its owners, slaying them, or forcing 
them westward. The Jutes, the first of the English 
tribes to effect a permanent settlement, landed about 449, 
and they were followed by two more important tribes, 
the Saxons (c. 477-491) and the Angles. The Britains 
fought with desperate bravery, but, after about a century 
and a quarter of conflict, the English had possessed them- 
selves of the best lands, and their mastery of the island 
was assured. 1 Important as was this work of conquest 
and settlement, it cannot have materially changed the 
Englishman's view of life, or widened his mental horizon. 
So far the civilisation of Europe had touched him no more 
nearly in his new home than it had in his old. He held, 
if somewhat less firmly, the old beliefs; he sang, we may 
assume, the same songs his fathers had made across the 
sea ; or, if the dramatic incidents of the conquest suggested 
new themes, he sang of new exploits in the old traditional 
manner. But towards the close of the sixth century 

1 That is from 449, the date of the landing of the Jutes, to 577, the 
date of the battle of Deorham. This was a battle between the West 
Saxons and the Britons. It was fought near Bath, and threw open the 
valley of the Severn to the Saxons. The Angles had meanwhile been 
independently advancing westward, and by 577 the eastern portion 
of the island was divided up among the various English kingdoms. 



46 TO XORMAX CONQUEST. 

there entered England a new force that was to transform 

the nation and make a new epoch in its literary history. 
This new force was Christianity, and it reached the Eng- 
lish from Rome and from Ireland. The first Christian 
The land- missionary ~ ; sent iirectly from Rome. In 
ing of st. 597 St. Augustine 1 and his band of forty 
Tig-os one. mon i- 5 _ sent ky p pg Gregory, landed on the 

little Isle of Thanet off the coast of Kent, on the very 
spot where the war-ships of Hengist and Horsa, the first 
English conquerors of Britain, had landed one hundred 
and forty-eight ye i s b g : ?re. Christianity was thus planted 
in the South of Britain, and the interrupted communica- 
tion with Rome and its civilization was reestablished. 

But while Rome Christianised the South, the lasting 
conversion of the North came not from the Roman, but 
from the Celt In : 5 Ai dan, a monk from the 
Irish mission station at Iona, an island oft the 
west coast of Scotland, settled in Northumbria and became 
the first great bishop of the North. After twenty years of 
contest with the old religion, Penda, King of Mercia, "the 
Last z-hampion of heathenism. ' was defeated and killed in 
battle (655), and English paganism gave way before the 
zeal and devotion of the Celt. 

" -"::h the coming of Christianity a new life begai 

Ekiglish people. It revealed a world of which t 

never dreamed; education, culture, li 

aod colrore. : '~-- '-- i: ~'- - : - : ~^ — -~ c t:':'-"Jl. I 

date this we must remember that in tb 
centuries, when modern Europe was beginning to take 

shape, the new nations were absorbing and turning to new 

: St. Au.£T.i5:ii:e. :: St. A-srin ~'-~ mis=i:n. . ;• :: :"ne English. — nst 
not be confused vrith the even greater St. Augustine (354r-i30), the 
author of the Conje&sio\s , and :ie :: ~.'-i :::.: area: Y-?r.'z~Ts ::' ::.e 
La:in Cr/ann. The 5:. A':rM;::if. ~L: nr;: :::j„: :.he >:r:r'. :: 
the English, had been a monk in a Benedictine convent at Rome. He 
became the first Archbishop of Canterbuiy, and died in, or about, 607. 



THE LITERATURE. 47 

uses fragments saved from the culture of the past. The 
Church was the chief heir and guardian of this classic learn- 
ing and culture, and upon the Church the gigantic task of 
educating and civilising the crude populations of Europe 
had almost entirely devolved. To be outside the pale of 
Christendom, therefore, was to be cut off from the intel- 
lectual traditions, the learning and the art, which Christian 
Europe had inherited from the Roman Empire. To be a 
part of Christendom, was to share in that civilisation which 
represented, however imperfectly, the accumulated results 
of thousands of years of human progress. 

And not only was England admitted to this older and 
larger world, but the circumstances of her conversion also 
gave her exceptional advantages, greater perhaps 
Christianity ^ nan an y °^ ner nation of Europe then enjoyed. 
' The first of these advantages was England's 
close relations to Celtic culture. At this time Ireland 
led Western Europe in scholarship and in her monastic 
schools, and England's proximity to Ireland was therefore 
a distinct intellectual gain. Ireland was an important fac- 
tor in England's education. The earliest monasteries in 
Northumbria were founded by Irish missionaries, or were 
the direct outcome of their labours ; while Englishmen some- 
times journeyed to Ireland to visit her famous teachers 
and consult her rare manuscripts. 1 

The second of these advantages was the exceptional 
ability of her teachers sent from Rome. These two teach- 
ers were Theodore of Tarsus, and Adrian, or 
Christianity Hadrian, a monk from Africa. Theodore, a 
Greek by birth, who had studied in Athens, 

1 Bede says that " many young noblemen and gentlemen " were in 
Ireland at the time of the plague of 664, " to improve themselves 
either in learning or virtue." He adds that they were furnished 
with books and teaching and accommodation free ; one of them returned 
to England full of learning and became a Bishop. Ecc. Hist. Bk. iii. 
chap, xxvii. 



48 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

brought with him some flavour of culture older than that of 
Rome. He was Archbishop of Canterbury from 668-690, 
and he made the school at Canterbury which St. Augustine 
had founded, ' of national importance. Hadrian, " the 
fountain of letters and river of arts," as an old chronicler 
calls him, was placed at the head of this school, and a great 
number of pupils gathered there, some coming from a long 
distance. Under these two teachers, Canterbury exerted a 
profound and far-reaching influence upon England's intellec- 
tual life. Greek, practically lost to Western Europe from 
the fifth to the fifteenth century, was taught there, besides 
the Bible, poetry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music. The 
school at Canterbury was the model of others, notably of 
a great school at York (735) ; and Adrian's pupil, Aldhelm 
of Malmesbury, became one of the most justly famous 
scholars of his time. 

The seventh century stands out in English history as an 
epoch of great ecclesiastical foundations, and wherever the 
The founding Church wen ^ f resn ideas an( ^ generally some 
of monasteries definite provision for education went likewise, 
and schools. It wag in the seventh cent ury that Hilda, a 

grand-niece of King Edwin of Northumbria, founded 
her famous Abbey on the cliffs at Whitby; that Benedict 
Biscop, or Baducing (c. 628-690), a Northumbrian noble, 
established two associated monasteries near the mouth of 
the rivers Tyne and Wear, enriching them with rare manu- 
scripts and precious relics which he had brought back from 
Rome. It was in the seventh century that Wilfred, Arch- 
bishop of York, introduced a higher standard in architecture 
by building at Hexham "the finest church on " the west- 
ern " side of the Alps." It was in the seventh century that 
the walls of great abbeys arose in the fenlands of Lincoln- 
shire, at Peterborough, Ely, and Crowland, and that the 
monastery at Malmesbury, on the western edge of Wessex, 
became a centre of culture through the labours of its Abbot 






THE LITERATURE. 49 



Aldhelm. These and many other churches, abbeys, and 
schools, set in the midst of dense ignorance, violence, and 
coarse brutality, wrought a marvellous change in the life of 
Englishmen. The century which followed the conversion 
of England may be justly compared to that educational 
period which prepared the way for the literary glories of 
the Elizabethan Age. In both the seventh and the fifteenth 
centuries England was stimulated and refreshed by the 
new ideas which reached her from beyond her borders, and, 
towards the close of both of these receptive or educational 
periods, the accumulation of fresh thought and emotion 
found expression in a new literary epoch. 

In the seventh century the Church was the parent of the 
new literature, the earliest English literature unquestion- 
ably native to English soil. It began with religious poetry, 
and its birthplace was the monastery and the monastic 
school. In a monastery C^edmon (c. 670), "the first Eng- 
lish poet whose name we know," composed that poem 
which begins the recorded history of English literature in 
England; it was in a monastery that Bede (670-735), the 
monk-scholar, lived his tranquil life of study and labour; 
while Aldhelm (640?-709), his great co-worker, was then 
abbot of a monastery and a bishop. The lives of these 
three men show us better than any general statement can 
do how a new life began for literature under the pressure 
of Christianity and Latin culture. 

C^edmon, as Bede tells us his story, was an inmate of St. 
Hilda's monastery of Streoneshalh, at Whitby. He was 
not a monk, but a plain, unlettered man, who 
took care of the cattle and shared, no doubt, in 
the practical tasks of the community. For some reason 
he could not make or recite poetry, although this was a 
favourite recreation among his companions, and so he was 
accustomed to steal away from the feast when the harp was 
passed from hand to hand so that each should sing in turn. 



50 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 



mtm sing me a s:^^." "I cam:-:: sing." Cardmm au- 
s~ered. mud that is mm I Lave yast left : he feast." " You 
must, however/' said the stranger, "sing forme." "What 

shall I sing? Caeduam ashed, ami he mas ummanded :: 
sing ■• in :he maise of :reati:m" Ami imuaeiiatelv Cam- 
mum in the praise of God tie Creator of all things. 
The matter mas brought to the notice : the Abbess; and 

Carina:::. being taken mure her. repeated to her :he verses 
he he a :emp :sed ha his sleep. The Aivmss.ieuevkug :ha: 
God baa given t: "his htuaaile naan a v-mderfeal girt, in- 
duced him :•: m mm a n::nn. ih ::al:i n:: reai. tut the 
A:::: ess haa the Bike era a aha;. :: hina. ana Carina :n. 
ranainaeing en v-ha: he had heard, named these portions 
:: i: :ha: mesa appealed :■: hina ine: verse paraphrasing in 
this way the Books of Genesis and Exodus, " and many 
other hismries :: ivy man" 

There is good reason to believe that this story is sub- 
stantially true, and the more we know about the strange 
workings of the a net's genins the less ~e shah he in :• lined. 
:■: .ha'::. Its details may have "men vluarei :y legend. 
but me :an. I think, still iisrmer simething of the 
real tin damn in this :ld saury: e he: dmatn-a :et. htuaaale- 
minded, s elf- iis trustful, unlearned. "::ut a gtod man vmese 
unsuspected genius, unstirred by the old heathen themes, 
awoke suddenly under the inspiration of the new religion. 

Catalan::: mas the f murder :: a ne~ s:ha:l of religitus 
pcetrv: he led the may int: a ne :rld. Bede says tha: 

•"many tamers mdeavmuedt: muapose mm 
i^h cvldT p tms in English, but none of these could ever 
e rural his." There is an :ld mauusuip: volume 
in the Bodleian Lit ram at Cm: m. made at :: a u.avmr c: 



THE LITERATURE. 51 

Early English poems. Since these poems agree generally in 
subject-matter and character with the Biblical paraphrases 
of Caedmon, it was assumed that they were his, and for a 
long time his reputed authorship of them remained un- 
questioned. Scholars are now sure that Caedmon did not 
write all of these poems, and many believe that not even 
a part of the book was composed by him. 1 Apparently 
the book is a collection of religious pieces, by various 
authors, arranged in the order of the Bible narrative. If 
it is true that not a line of it was actually composed by 
Caedmon, it is probable that his poems served as a model, 
or that they were used as the basis of the work. 

The poems themselves are of very unequal merit. In 
some instances we have but a dull, almost mechanical 

paraphrase; in others a scene or character is 
poems. revealed to us with that imaginative definite- 

ness which marks the true poet. On the whole, 
we feel that this religious poetry is close to poetry of the old 
heathen past; it is the poetry of the scop, little changed 
in spirit or in metrical form, but it has found a new theme. 
When the poet uses his original with the greatest freedom, 
and gives the fullest scope to his own power, then we feel 
this resemblance most strongly. Satan is brought before 
us as a warrior, proud, daring, defiant, a rebellious vassal. 
He gathers his faithful followers to his cause, as the kings 
and chiefs among the English were wont to rally their 
thanes, their chosen body-guard, to their support. "Stand 
by me strong supporters, firm in strife." After his 
overthrow he reminds them of the nature of this bond 
between them, declaring that if he has ever given them 

1 Competent scholars now generally agree that all we have of 
Caedmon's writing are the nine lines of his Hymn. This is probably 
the first piece of extant English literature composed on English soil. 
The lines are found at the end of the Moore MS. of Bede's Ecclesiastical 
History, and were probably copied there in or about the year 737. 
See the translation in Cook and Tinker's Select Translations, p. 77, 



52 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

princely gifts in the old days in that good kingdom, now 
is the time to repay him by faithful service. He appeals, 
then, to the same obligation which is felt by Wiglaf, the 
thane of Beowulf, in the fight with the dragon: " I mind 
me, the time we drank the mead, we vowed then to our 
lord in the beer-hall, who gave us these rings, that we 
would requite Mm for our war-gear, the helmets and 
swords of temper, if this-like need should befall him." 1 

We find, too, especially in the Exodus, the true fighting 
spirit of the Teuton, and a delight in the very pomp and 
trappings of war. The approach of the host of Pharaoh 
is thus described: 

"They prepared their arms, 
The war advanced, 
Bucklers glittered, 
Trumpets sang, 
Standards rattled, 



Among them scream 

The fowls of war, 

Greedy of battle, 

Dewy-feathered, 

Over the bodies of the host 

The dark choosers of the slain: 

The wolves sing their 

Horrid evensong." 2 



The poet sings of these things as a Christian scop. The 
battles are English battles, for the singer has taken the 
Bible story, and translated it by the light of his own under- 
standing or experience. 

There are a number of other religious poems besides the 
Biblical Parapkases of Csedmon and his followers. As a 
rule, these poems are not founded on the Bible, 
gious poems. ^ u ^ on som e legend of an apostle, martyr or 
saint. Thus, the Andreas treats of the adven- 
tures of the apostle St. Andrew, who goes into a land of 

1 Beowulf, Child's translation, p c 72. 3 Thorpe's translation. 



THE LITERATURE. 53 

cannibals and sorcerers to rescue St. Matthew; the Juliana 
is the story of a saint and martyr, who refused to become 
the wife of a pagan; the Guthlac describes the temptations, 
triumphs, and death of Guthlac, an English saint of the 
eighth century, who forsook the world and lived the life 
of a hermit in the fens of East-Anglia, or Lincolnshire. 1 
Among these religious poems the Judith, the Phoenix, The 
Dream of the Rood, and the Crist, or Christ, are of especial 
interest. The Judith and the Phoenix are strikingly dif- 
ferent. The Judith is an epic fragment, the greater part 
of which is lost. It tells the story of the Jewish heroine 
related in the Apocryphal Book of Judith, who slew the 
enemies' captain Holof ernes to deliver her native town. It 
brings before us the Anglo-Saxon battle ; the din of shields, 
the showers of arms, " the smoke of war," the lean wolf 
on the edge of the wood, the black raven, and the eagle 
waiting for the prey. Judith, beautiful and terrible, shows 
neither fear, hesitation, nor pity; the warriors march grim 
and relentless to take vengeance on their enemies bewil- 
dered with wine. 2 

While Judith is full of heroic daring, of blows and revenge 
and the tumult of battle, the poem of the Phoenix lifts us 
into an ideal region of rest and peace. The Phoenix the 
wonderful bird of the Eastern fable, which rises into re- 

1 St. Guthlac died in 714. Crowland Abbey was built, possibly 
by King iEthelbald of Mercia, on the site of Guthlac's retreat. 

2 In his fine poem Judith and Holof ernes (1896), Aldrich has intro- 
duced " a note of tenderness " into Judith's character not found in the 
Apocryphal story, or in the Anglo-Saxon poem. Aldrich, for instance, 
makes Judith hesitate before she kills the sleeping Holofernes : 

"And Judith looked on him, and pity crept 
Into her bosom. . . . 

O broken sword of proof! O Prince betrayed I 
Her he had trusted, he who trusted none. 
The sharp thought pierced her, and her breast was torn, 
And half she longed to bid her purpose die," etc. 



54 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

ne wed life from the ashes of its nest, dwells in a far eastern 
island. This island is an earthly paradise such as the Celts 
and the poets of many other races have loved to imagine. 
The green forests stretch far and wide beneath the skies, 
and there "neither rain nor snow, nor breath of frost, nor 
fall of hoar-frost, nor heat of snn. nor ever-during cold, nor 
warm weather, nor winter shower, works aught of harm. 
The land is full of flowers, the fruits fail not, and the trees 
are forever green." l 

The authorship of most of these religious poems is un- 
known or conjectural, but it is certain that at least four 
of them were written by a poet named Crxz- 
wulf. We knovr this because CynewuU has 
woven his name in runic letters into the text of the 
Elene, Juliana, Fates of the Apostles, and Christ, so as to 
form an acrostic. There is no other record of this man ; 
who was certainly one of the greatest poets of his time, 
but he is generally supposed to have been a Northumbrian 
scop, who lived in the latter pan of the eighth century. 
Some suppose him to have been the author of the Andreas, 
Judith, and a remarkable collection of poetical Riddles, 
and various other poems have been attributed to him. 
But while history is silent about Cynewulf . there are several 
remarkable passages in Ms poems in which he tells us 
of himself. These passages tell us little of the outward 
events of his life, but they reveal with sufficient clearness 
the depths of his inner experience. We gather that in 
his youth he tasted of pleasure and success as the favourite 
of the great, and that he had received "'the jewel and the 

1 Cf. Tennyson's description of '''the island — valley of Avilion," — 

"Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies 
Deep-meadow 'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns 
And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea. " 

— Idylls of the King: " The Passing oj Arthur.'' 



THE LITERATURE. 55 

twisted gold in the mead-hall," the reward perhaps of his 
songs. But sorrow overtakes him, perhaps some definite 
grief from without, perhaps simply some secret change, 
some crisis in his spiritual growth, and earthly pleasures 
seem poor and empty. The disillusionment of age is heavy 
on him. "Joy has waned, pleasure has decreased with 
the years; youth has fled, the former pride." An over- 
whelming sense of the transitoriness of all the things which 
man delights in takes possession of him; it all passes, and 
the joy of life slips away like running water. He is tor- 
mented by the remembrance of the errors of his careless 
youth; he speaks of himself as "guilty of misdeeds, fet- 
tered by sins, bowed with bitterness, beset with tribu- 
lations." But at last his whole view of life is changed; 
he finds comfort in religion, and the Divine power lifts 
^ him out of this depth of despair, unlocks his heart, and 
grants him again the power of song. So, old and ready 
to depart by reason of the treacherous house of the flesh, 
he composes Christian poems, not free from sadness in- 
deed, but full of hope and peace. 1 
His poem of Christ is bright with the assurance of a 

final triumph. The heavens are opened, and 
•MEirist." 8 we hear the hymning of angels. The voice of 

God declares in words that seem to scatter the 
ancient darkness of English heathenism: 

"Let there be light for ever and ever, 
A radiant joy for each of living men 
Who in their generations shall be born. " 3 

The poem treats of "the threefold coming of Christ, his 
birth, his ascension, and his advent at the last judgment," 

1 Cynewulf's Rune passages are given in translation in Cook and 
Tinker's Translations, Morley's English Writers, vol. ii., and Brooke's 
Early English Literature; but see also Professor Cook's Introd. to 
Judith, and Professor Strunk's Introd. to Elene, in Belles Lettres Series. 

2 Christ, Gollancz ' translation. 



56 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

and its serenity is broken by a terrible, vision of judgment. 
But its final note is triumph, as the poet pictures the 
happiness of those who have endured and overcome: 

"There is angels' song; the bliss of the happy; 



A gladsome host of men; youth without age; 

The glory of the heavenly chivalry; health without pain 

For righteous workers ; and for souls sublime 

Rest without toil ; there is day without dark gloom, 

Ever gloriously bright ; bliss without bale ; 

Friendship 'twixt friends forever without feud ; 

Peace without enmity for the blest in Heaven, 

In the communion of Saints. " 1 

We are ignorant, of almost any incident in Cynewulfs 
life, yet the man himself — apart from the accidents of 
birth and surroundings — survives in his work. In spite 
of all the vagueness of his language he is very real to us. 
The "cry of Cynewulf," as it has been called, moves us 
to-day after the passage of a thousand years, for it comes 
out of the depths of a man's soul. It has the directness 
and truth of that "lyric cry 7 ' which misery and disappoint- 
ment wrung from the heart of Burns. Such a cry 
interprets the grief that is common to man; and whether 
it is uttered by King David, by Cynewulf, or by Burns, 
our human nature responds to it and understands. 

The earliest attempts of the English at literary ex- 
pression were cast in the poetic form. This form was 
very different from that of the poetry with 
verse!" aX ° n which we are familiar; but, while the Anglo- 
Saxon verse may sound rough and hard to us, 
as rendered by the gleeman, it was doubtless both vigorous 
and inspiriting. In form this Anglo-Saxon poetry may be 
described as a rhythmical chant. Each verse, or line, was 
composed of two half lines, separated by a pause, or 
ccesura. There was no rhyme, nor was the number of 
1 Christ, Gollancz' translation. 



THE LITERATURE. 57 

syllables in each verse always the same. Instead of rhyme 
the Anglo-Saxon poet employed alliteration, that is, he 
habitually introduced words beginning with the same 
sound; while the regular beat, or rhythm, was given by 
emphasising, or accenting, these alliterative words. It 
was usual to have one or two of these emphatic, or ac- 
cented, words or syllables in the first half of the line, and 
only one in the second, thus : 

Oft Scyld Reefing sceafcena ^reatum * 

Oft Skyld Scifing from scathers thronging. 2 

Probably a strong twang on the harp at the accented 
words reenforced the emphasis of the voice and heightened 
the marching movement of the rhythm. 

When Christianity gave a fresh impulse to English lit- 
erature, it did not at first change its manner, it simply gave 
. it new subjects. It took the traditional poetic 

and litera- form, and turned it to a new use. The chief 
ture - T ^ e centre of this Christian poetry, which is gen- 
' erally thought to have begun with Csedmon, 
appears to have been in Northumbria, where the infusion 
of Celtic culture was especially strong. It was not long, 
however, before the knowledge of the various branches 
of foreign learning introduced by the Church brought 
about a new stage of literary development. Beside 
the poet, the Christian scdp, who belongs at once to 
the old world and the new, there appears the monk-scholar, 
an Englishman of a wholly new order, the representative 
of a class which was destined to guide the intellectual 
development of Europe for centuries to come. This begin- 
ning of English scholarship is directly traceable to the Can- 
terbury school of Theodore and Adrian. From this school, 
says Green, "our written literature" — the literature, that 

1 Anglo-Saxon character ]d = th. 2 Beowulf, I. 4. 



58 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

is, of the English in Britain — "took its birth." 1 From this 
school came Aldhelm, the first Englishman to gain emi- 
nence as a classical scholar and teacher, 2 who 
Aldhelm. . 

began in the South a work similar to that which 

Bede, at a little later date, took up in the North. Aid- 
helm's learning was gained from Ireland as well as from 
Rome. His first teacher was Maildulf, or Meldun, an Irish- 
man who had retired into a lonely spot in the woods of 
Northern Wessex, which came to be known as Maildulf es- 
burh (Maildulf "s-t own) or Malmesbury. From Maknes- 
bury Aldhelm went to Canterbury to study under Adrian, 
returning full of the inspiration of the new learning. After 
the death of his old teacher, he was made Abbot of Malmes- 
bury, and later Bishop of Sherborne. He died in 709. 
Aldhelm was a leader in the intellectual awakening of Eng- 
land, and the fame of his learning extended to Scotland 
and to the Continent. He helped forward the advance of 
English architecture, and a church which he built at Brad- 
ford-on- Avon still stands as a memorial to his labours. 
Although he wrote much in Latin, both in prose and verse, 
Aldhelm did not neglect his native tongue, and King 
Alfred pronounced him the best English poet of his time. A 
familiar story of him shows his skill as a poet and a musi- 
cian, as well as his power of being all things to all men. 
We are told that when he found that the congregation at 
Malmesbury was in the habit of leaving church before the 
sermon, Aldhelm disguised himself as a gleeman and sta- 
tioned himself on a bridge near the town. The people 
coming from church crowded about him, and when he had 
gained their attention Aldhelm gradually introduced words 
of Scripture into his song, and so in effect made his hearers 

1 Making of England, 326. 

2 Aldhelm, says Professor Stubbs, "was the first Englishman who 
cultivated classical learning with any success, and the first of whom any 
literary remains are preserved." Diet. Christ. Biog."; "Aldhelm." 



THE LITERATURE. 59 

listen to a sermon vithout knowing it. As none of Aid- 
helm's poems have been preserved, we are too apt to think 
of him only as "the Father of Anglo-Latin Poetry." He 
was more than this : his is the earliest name that we know 
in the English poetry of the South. 1 He had his share in 
creating the poetry of the people, — how great a share we 
can only conjecture; but we know that four hundred years 
after his death Aldhelm's songs were still remembered and 
sung. 

Wide-spread as was Aldhelm's influence upon his 
contemporaries, after his death learning and literature in 
Wessex rapidly declined. During the eighth 
the south, century Wessex was troubled by civil strife ; 
it was menaced by the rival power of the rising 
kingdom of Mercia; and, finally, it was forced to face 
repeated Danish invasions. Ignorance increased, literature 
languished, and Aldhelm is the one Southern writer of any 
prominence, until we come to King Alfred, nearly two cen- 
turies later. 

Very different was the history of literature and learning 
in the North. The great kingdom of Northumbria, al- 
though it failed to maintain its political suprem- 
Literature in i £ •, ,. ,, 

the North. acv > remained for several generations the 

intellectual centre of Western Europe. The in- 
fluences that contributed to this result have already been 
indicated. The zeal of Irish missionaries, the favour of 
Northumbrian kings, the spread of Roman civilisation, all 
worked together towards the same end. The learning of 
the school at Canterbury mingled with the learning derived 
from Celtic teachers. The Northumbrian noble, Bene- 
dict Biscop, introduced glass from abroad, and brought a 
collection of books and relics from Rome (cir. 678). The 

1 It is not unlikely that Aldhelm's English poems antedated those 
of Caedmon, who is commonly accounted "the Father of English 
Poetry. " 



60 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

fame of the school at York spread throughout Europe, 
while its library was said to have no equal outside of Rome. 
We have seen that this new culture first found literary ex- 
pression through poetry, and that less than half a century 
after the coming of Aidan from Iona (635) Csedrnon 
founded a school of religious verse (cir. 670). The second 
great outcome of these new intellectual conditions, follow- 
ing hard upon the first, is the rise of a school of Latin, or 
Anglo-Latin literature, written almost entirely in prose. 
The greatest and one of the earliest of these 
Northern scholars was B^da ? or Bede ; the most 
famous man of letters of his time. 

Bede was born in 673 on the Northumbrian coast near 
the mouth of the river Wear. .A year later his birth- 
place became the territory of the Church, as it was part 
of a tract of land granted to Benedict Biscop. On this 
land Biscop built the monastery of St. Peter's (674), and a 
little later the neighbouring monastery of St. Paul at 
Jarrow. Bede, early left an orphan, was intrusted to the 
care of the Abbot Benedict, who placed the child, then 
seven years old, in the monastery of St. Peter. There, 
and in the associated monastery at Jarrow, to which he 
was afterwards transferred, all the rest of his life was 
passed. Bede himself has summed up the history of his 
fifty-five years of monastic life in a few words: "I wholly 
applied myself to the study of the Scripture; and, amidst 
the observance of regular discipline, and the daily care of 
singing in the church, I always took delight in learning, 
teaching, and writing." * This is the simple record of a 
useful and well-ordered life, filled with varied activities, 
but tranquil and content. 

Bede, as his words imply, was a student, a teacher, a 
writer; indeed, it is hardly too much to say that he was the 
best scholar, the most influential teacher, and the greatest 
1 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, Bk. v. chap. xxiv. 



THE LITERATURE. 61 

man of letters, in all Europe in his time. His life was a 
fortunate one. As a student he had opportunities which 
at that day were open to very few. Not every monastery 
had an abbot so able and progressive as Benedict, Bede's 
first teacher, and it is probable that few monasteries 
in Western Europe were furnished with a library equal to 
that which Benedict had gathered at Jarrow. Even the 
site of the monastery was favourable, for it was sufficiently 
central for Bede to avail himself of the learning of Ire- 
land and of Rome, of Gaul and of Canterbury. * With 
the keen love of knowledge, the unwearied industry, the 
broadly receptive mind of a great scholar, Bede absorbed 
from such varied sources nearly all that was best in the 
learning of his day. He knew Latin and Greek, and had 
even some acquaintance with Hebrew. Quotations from 
the classical poets are found in his works. He wrote 
about forty books, many of them text-books for the use of 
his scholars, upon a great variety of subjects. His com- 
mentaries on the Bible bear witness to the thoroughness 
of his studies ; his little book on natural science 
writer"* *" (-® e datura Berum) shows that he had mas- 
tered the popular science of his day. Besides all 
this foreign learning, he knew and loved the songs of England, 
and he was above all a student of her history. His Eccle- 
siastical History of the English People, his best known and 
most valuable book, is the chief authority for the period 
of which it treats. By this book Bede "was at once the 
founder of mediaeval history and the first English histo- 
rian." 2 Bede wrote in Latin, as all the scholars of 
Europe did at that time and for long after, but his last 
book, the closing words of which he dictated to his scribes 
almost with his dying breath, was an English translation 
of the Gospel of St. John. 

1 See Bishop Stubbs's article on "Bede" in Diet. Christ. Biog. 
1 J. R. Green. 



62 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

As a teacher Bede holds an important place in the 
educational history of Europe. At one time six hundred 
scholars including strangers from a distance are 
teacher* " sa ^ ^° nave attended his school at Jarrow. 
He helped to mould the great school at York. 
His pupil Egbert became the head of the school, and Egbert's 
great pupil Alcuin (735-804) went to the Continent and 
organised the schools of Charlemagne, " on which the cul- 
ture of the Middle Ages was based." * 

Bede did a great work, but the man himself was even 
greater than his books. His life in its simplicity, its 
singleness of purpose, its lofty aim, has a 
' 'singular unity and completeness. Gentle, hat- 
ing a lie, or the least inaccuracy or slovenliness in work, 
and remarkably free from the prejudices of his age, the 
character of Bede is exceedingly lovable and noble. In 
him, as in Cynewulf, the stern submission to an unknown 
weird is lost in the joyous acceptance of a larger hope. 
Well might he repeat in his last illness that noble sentence 
of St. Ambrose: "I have not lived so as to be ashamed 
to live among you; nor am I afraid to die, because we 
have a good God." The meaning and influence of such a 
life grows clearer, as we read in the unaffected words of 
one of his disciples the story of the Master's death. With 
failing breath he had toiled through the day, dictating 
his translation of St. John's Gospel, and as the day 
closed, his work was done. At twilight, amid his weep- 
ing scholars, his face turned towards the oratory where 
he was wont to pray, with "great tranquillity" his soul 
went out from among them. 

The conditions which had lifted Northumbria into in- 
tellectual leadership, and made Bede the great teacher of 
the Western world, were not destined to last. Soon after 
Bede's death (735), dangers began to threaten it from 

1 Bishop Stubbs's Diet. Christ Biog., art. "Bede," 



THE LITERATURE. 63 

within and without. The peaceful work of the monasteries, 
indeed, went on without interruption, and the 
o?Nortiram- scno °l at York rose to eminence; but the king- 
bria, and the dom became a prey to treason, lawlessness, and 
th^Danes. P^gue- Finally, towards the close of the cen- 
tury (cir. 787), came the Danish pirates. These 
heathen adventurers were a greater menace to learning 
than civil or foreign war. They came originally for plunder, 
and they were especially attracted by the riches of the 
great religious houses. In 793 they plundered the monas- 
tery of Lindisfarne; in the year following they sacked and 
burnt the monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow. In the 
next century they came not only to plunder but to conquer. 
They captured York (867), and Northumbria became 
the land of the heathen Dane. The civilisation of the 
North, which men had been building up for more than two 
hundred years, perished, for the very sources of literature 
and learning were destroyed. They sacked abbeys and 
churches, they burned the libraries, and broke up the 
schools. Streoneshalh, the home of Casdmon, was demol- 
ished, and the place was called by the Danish name of 
Whitby. " There was not one home of learning left from 
the Forth to the Humber." * Two years later they entered 
East Anglia, to plunder and destroy Peterborough, Crow- 
land, and Ely, the great religious houses of the fens. The 
fate of all England hung in the balance, until at last they 
were checked by the steadfast heroism of King Alfred 
(battle of Edington, 878). It was after this battle that 
Alfred made his famous treaty with the Danes, the Peace 
of Chippenham (878). Under this, although a great tract 
of England was surrendered to the invaders, Alfred 
retained all of Southern and part of Middle England. 
England was indeed saved for the English, but the Dane 

1 Stopford Brooke's English Literature from the Beginning to the 
Norman Conquest, p. 124. 



64 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

was master from the northern bank of the Thames to the 
river Tees. 

But while learning and civilisation in the North had 
received a blow from which it took them centuries to 
The revival recover, in the South they rose into new life 
of learning in under the unflagging and comprehensive energy 
Alfred?* ' °f Alfred. The intellectual and literary preemi- 
nence of Northumbriawas due to a happy combi- 
nation of causes ; the sudden rise of Wessex to a position 
of literary leadership was the work of one man. From his 
youth Alfred had loved books. When he was called to 
the throne, England had already lost her place as a centre 
of European culture, and the Dane threatened to sweep 
away even the remnants of learning that were left. So 
utterly had learning fallen away in England, writes King 
Alfred in a famous passage, " that there were very few on 
this side of the Humber who could understand their ser- 
vice-books in English, or even put a letter from Latin into 
English; and-I think there were not many beyond the Hum- 
ber. So few there were of them that I cannot think of 
even one when I came to the throne." l For the first fif- 
teen years of his reign (871-cir. 886), Alfred was occupied 
in fighting for the very existence of his kingdom, or in pro- 
viding means for its defence. His first duty was not to en- 
courage civilisation, but to preserve it by the sword. But 
after he had concluded a second peace with the Danes 
(886), the king was able to spare more time for his work 
of reform. He restored the religious houses and founded 
a monastery at Athelney; he established a school at his 
court for the education of the young nobles. His children 
were brought up to use books constantly, and were especially 
taught " the Saxon" (or English) poems. 2 He laboured for 

1 Alfred's preface to his translation of St. Gregory's Pastoral Care 
QJura Pastoralis), or " Herds-man's Book." 
* Asser's Life of Alfred. 



THE LITERATURE. 65 

the better training of the priesthood, and was a friend to 
the monks, although he believed that learning should not 
be monopolised by the clergy. His ideas on popular edu- 
cation were far in advance of his time. It was his wish 
that " all the youth now in England of free men who have 
the wealth to be able to set themselves to it be put to 
learning while they are not of use for anything else." 

"Those whom one wishes to teach further," he 
fd£c e atio£ d adds > " let them afterwards be taught further in 

the Latin tongue." These memorable words are 
the best explanation of the services of King Alfred to lit- 
erature. Education is to be made as general as is practica- 
ble, and the language of the elementary or ordinary educa- 
tion is to be English, the language of the people, not Latin, 
the language of the ecclesiastical class. One great obstacle 
to the carrying out of this plan was the dearth of books in 
English. Latin was the ordinary medium of education; 
the text-books were in Latin, as well as nearly all of the lit- 
erature of the time. Alfred saw that the most needful of 
these Latin books must be translated into English, that 
learning should thus be made the possession of the people. 
The king himself knew little or nothing of Latin, but from 
time to time, after the treaty of Chippenham, he gathered 
learned men about him and became a pupil. Some of 
these men were English, but learning had so fallen away in 
England that he was obliged to seek further help from 
abroad. Among those who came was Asser, the Welsh- 
man, who became the king's biographer. The king in- 
spired these men with something of his own indomitable 
spirit, but he did even more than this ; in spite of the weight 

of his "manifold cares," in spite of the heavy 
translations Durden °f illness, he undertook the task of 

translating into English the books " most need- 
ful" for his people. 

One of Alfred's first works was a translation of the Shep- 



66 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

herd's Model (Regula (or Curd) Pastoralis) of Pope Gregory 
the Great. This book, as its name implies, was a hand- 
book for the clergy, the shepherds of the people, intended 
to guide them in their duties and furnish them with the 
model of the ideal priest. The clergy were the teachers of 
the kingdom, and on the improvement of the clergy Alfred's 
educational reform must be based. A copy of this book 
was sent to every bishopric, and the very book which the 
king sent to Worcester is now in the Bodleian Library at 
Oxford. Alfred also translated the greater part of Bede's 
Ecclesiastical History, 1 so that Englishmen might read the 
story of their native land in their own tongue. Alfred's 
patriotism did not make him provincial. In order that his 
people should know something of the world outside, he made 
a free rendering of a book which was then the standard man- 
ual of general history, the work of Paulus Orosius, a Span- 
ish monk of the fifth century. But it is misleading to think 
of Alfred as a mere translator. His object was not to give 
a literal version of his original, but to adapt it to the popular 
use, to edit it, condensing or expanding it as he thought 
best. Alfred is therefore an author as well as a translator, 
and he has left on many a passage the impress of his own 
character. This is especially applicable to his translation, 
or adaptation, of Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy 
(De Consolatione Philosophic), a famous book through- 
out the Middle Ages. Boethius, a Roman patrician of the 
fifth and sixth centuries, was imprisoned for treason, and in 
this book he endeavoured to comfort himself by philosophy. 
In paraphrasing and adapting the book of Boethius, Alfred 
fills it with his own spirit, until, as Mr. Frederic Harrison 
says, "it is almost an original treatise." It is full of noble 
and lofty thoughts, and nowhere do we get nearer to the 

1 Some think it more probable that Bede's History was not trans- 
lated by Alfred himself, but by one of his priests by the king's com- 
mand. 



THE LITERATURE. 67 

soul of the great king. "Alfred took the Meditations of 
Boethius as a standard text-book of moral and religious 
thought, and he uses it as the basis of his own musings 
upon man, the world, and God." * So far as we know, 
Boethius was not a Christian, but Alfred transposes his Con- 
solations of Philosophy into the consolations of religion. It 
is Alfred, not Boethius, who writes: "Lift up your hearts 
to Him when ye raise your hands, and pray for what is 
right and needful for you, for He will not deny you." 2 
" Some sages, however, say that Fate rules both weal and 
woe of every man. But I say, as do all Christian men, 
that it is the divine purpose that- rules them, not Fate; 
and I know that it judges all things very rightly, though 
unthinking men may not think so." 3 

The translations of King Alfred remain one of the 
great landmarks of literary history. He made them to 
Alfred and ^ an immediate and pressing need; but the 
English work, humbly and simply done, had a far 
wider and more lasting influence than he could 
have imagined, for it was the true beginning of English 
prose. With him begins the stream of English prose that 
was to broaden and deepen until its waters should cover 
half the globe. And not only is Alfred "the founder of 
English prose," but he anticipated also a new stage in the 
advance of learning, for he was the first English man of 
letters who was not an ecclesiastic. Theodore of Tarsus, 
Adrian, Aldhelm, and Bede were priests, and they wrote 
in Latin, the language of the Church; but King Alfred was 
a layman, and it was reserved for him to take prose litera- 
ture out of Latin, the language of the Church, and put it 
into English, the language of the people. 

1 The Writings of King Alfred, by Frederic Harrison. 

2 King Alfred's Version of the Consolations of Boethius, Trans, by 
W. J. Sedgefield, p. 175, 

3 lb. p. 153. 



68 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

Apart from their influence on English prose, Alfred's 
writings have no little intrinsic merit. He was far from 
being a literary artist, or a finished scholar; but many 
passages scattered through his translations bring us near 
to a very good and a very great man. He had little need 
of the refinements of a conscious art, for his style has a 
dignity and elevation of tone that is the natural expression 
of the man. He lived in the company of wise and lofty 
thoughts, and he has told us something of his inner 
life, his meditations and his hopes, with a transparent 
sincerity and simplicity. We feel this in that noble 
sentence from Boethius which is so closely associated with 
his- name. "To be brief, I may say that it has ever been 
my desire to live honourably while I was alive, and after 
my death to leave to them that should come after me my 
memory in good works. " * 

It was during Alfred's reign, and probably under his 
direct influence and supervision, that the English Chronicle 
was revived and rearranged in a fuller and 
Chronicle. 8 better form. From very early times it had been 
the custom in certain monasteries to make a 
brief record of the most important historical events of each 
year. This was done in the monasteries in Northumbria, 
and the same practice was followed at Canterbury and 
Winchester. It will be remembered that Alfred lived at 
Winchester, which was then the capital of Wessex, so it was 
but natural that the Winchester Annah should be selected 
as the basis of the revised history. The old Annals, besides 
being enlarged, were continued so as to include the greater 
part of Alfred's reign. But the Chronicle does not end 
with Alfred; for two hundred and fifty years after his death 
the monks went on adding to the wonderful record of 
England's history, until it finally came to an end with an 

1 King Alfred's Version of the Consolations of Boethius, trans, by 
W. J. Sedgefield, p. 42. 



THE LITERATURE. 69 

account of the accession of Henry II. in 1154, written by 
a monk of Peterborough, the last in the long succession 
of English Chroniclers. The English Chronicle covers a 
period of seven centuries, from the middle of the fifth to 
the middle of the twelfth century. For the most part, 
it is, as its name implies, a brief, dry statement of facts, 
not a finished history. Here, for example, is the record 
for the year 806: "Here the moon eclipsed on Sept. 1; 
and Eardwulf, King of the Northumbrians, was driven 
from his realm; and Eanbert, Bishop of Hexham, died." 
But in some places, as in an oft quoted description of 
William the Conqueror, it is fuller, and shows a power of 
portraying character and a greater literary skill. Occa- 
sionally the dry prose record is abandoned for verse. Two 
poems, one celebrating the battle with the Scots at Bru- 
nanburh in 937, the other describing the defeat and death 
of Byrhtnoth in a stubborn contest with the Danes at 
Maldon (991), are alive with the old fighting spirit of 
the race. 

However direct a share Alfred may have taken in the 
editing of the Chronicle, its improvement is naturally 
Growth of related to that elevation of English prose into 
English a literary importance which is one of the glories 
pro of his reign. As the history of English poetry 

reaches back to that great era when Northumbrian schol- 
arship was paramount in the West, the rise of English 
prose dates from the court of Alfred at Winchester. 

The century and a half which lies between the death of 
Alfred and the Norman Conquest (901-1066) produced 
little of sufficient value from a purely literary aspect to 
F Alf detain ^ ne general reader. Yet certain features 
to the of the period must be fixed in the mind if we 

CoTuSt wou ^ not l° ose our hold on the continuity of 
England's mental growth. Although the coun- 
try ceded to the Danes by the Treaty of Chippenham (878) 



70 TO NORMAN CONQUEST. 

was gradually won back under Alfred's successors. Edward 
the Elder « : 901-92o, and Atheist ane ,925-940;, Wes- 
sex and the South retained that literary and political 
supremacy which .Alfred had begun. After the ravages 
and final settlement of the Danes., the brilliant literary 
activity of the Xorth seems to have been extinguished, 
and for more than three centuries after the death of Al- 
cuin [804) the pathetic silence that settles dovm on North- 
umbria remains almost unbroken. In the South alone, 
where the effects of Alfred's practical enthusiasm still 
lingered, we find the traditions of culture and the signs of 
some literary activity. This Southern learning and liter- 
ature was chiefly associated with great religious founda- 
tions and with the history of the Church. The men 
who rise into literary prominence are chiefly ecclesiastical 
dignitaries: Duxstan 924-9 >S . Abbot of Glastonbury, 
and afterward Archbishop of Canterbury: JEthelwold 
908 ? -9S4 . Bishop of Winchester: JElfric fl. H 
Abbot of Eynshani, or Enshani, near Oxford. The ener- 
gies of these men, and especially of the two last mentioned, 
were largely occupied in introducing into the English 
monasteries, that had become worldly and corrupt, the 
stricter rule of life which had already begun to prevail in 
Gaul and Flanders. They were educational and monastic 
reformers, and the tone of then work is consequently 
scholarly or theological. JElfric "'is the voice of that 
grea r Church reform which is the most signal fact in the 
history of the latter hah of the tenth century." Hi? 
Homilies, or sermons 990-994X are probably the best 
examples of Old English or Anglo-Saxon prose that we 
possess. In bulk the extant writings of Jilfric exceed 
those even of Alfred. The most important of these 
writings, except the Homilies, are his metrical Lives of 
Saints: but he wrote treatises on grammar and astronomy, 
translated a considerable part of the Old Testament, and 



THE LITERATURE. 71 

was the author of a number of theological works. He is 
by far the prose writer of greatest importance after Alfred. 

On the whole, we observe that while poetry had held a 
large place in Northumbria during the era of her literary 
leadership, the energies of Wessex during this later period 
find their main outlet in prose. The historic prose of the 
Chronicle (broken occasionally by the chant of the war- 
song) , text-books, sermons, or the lives of saints : such is 
the shape taken by the literary production of this time. 

In the four centuries that lie between Caedmon and the 
Norman Conquest, England had surpassed every other na- 
tion of Northern Europe in literary achievement, 
literature None of her neighbours in that early time could 
before the boast of such famous scholars, such a body of 
Congest. native poetry and prose. But it cannot be 
denied that toward the end of this period there 
was an evident loss of creative power, and many other 
symptoms of decline. In the tenth century the English 
seemed to be sinking into a narrow insularity and stagna- 
tion. The old impulse that had come from Christianity 
and Roman culture had apparently spent its force, and the 
nation waited for the breath of a new impulse. This came 
suddenly with the Norman Conquest. 



CHAPTER II. 
FROM THE XOR31AN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 



"Jh-is ::-. !:■! E^lcnde in:-: Norm 
Lo! Thus rime England in:o :de X 
— RcsZr.T :r '_-i : r ::^:i? s ^''/ :::: 

"The lgngK«h at that fame i.e., just before 
to have had little spirit of enterprise; they ha 

quiet kind :: fanner's life. ::n~ent ~ntn bidding 
:i tiieir en-inties. The Ntrmans ~ere restless 



:>ver tne ~n:.e ~ mi ere tne — ngasn: . . . .us l= cue :•: :ie .Ncrnii^ 
fire and energy, which ; Dined itself to the Teuton perseverance and 



I : grasr tie ~ trld ~ltn. and a ::■:: :o siamr. i: — 
Flat." 

— Iznxyson-'s Harold, 

The Norman Conquest in Enghini in 10*56 begins a ne~ 

The effect of -- rr ' _ in. .ire a. ^-_ ^'■•:-~r '"■ y— --- 'jnange-5 

the "Scrz.ii ~: aeeht :;v -he dScrman that it seems at nrst 

Conquest. ..-:.. . . 

Smm a> -mitim u.n. S. f ■ -"•" v-;~^r- r~ ~ " - 

older England had disappeared. The land was helpless 

in the mailed it:.:::: :■: a smmge rale:: foreigners held 
the chief offices; the country was filled with these stran- 
gers, proud, masterful men, en-English in speech, in dress, 



THE NORMANS. 73 

in taste, and in character. Numbers of the great estates 
passed into the possession of these intruders, until the land- 
owning class was nearly all composed of Normans. Eng- 
land was a conquered country; and the Norman tower, 
massive, square, and obdurate, was the sign of the English- 
man's subjection, the witness to the hated foreign rule. 

The Norman was the last in a long procession of con- 
quering races. From a time before the beginning of re- 
__ „ corded history, the island appears to have been 

The Norman J > f f • • ■ a 

Conquest swept by wave after wave of foreign invasion, and 
and previous ^hese primitive struggles were followed by the 

invasions. \ °° J 

successive conquest of the Iberian, Celt, and 
Roman, the Englishman and the Dane. Each of these 
successive conquerors, except the Roman, made some last- 
ing and especial contribution to the national life. Finally, 
with the coming of the Norman, a new ingredient was added 
to the wonderful mixture of character and race. We may 
compare the land of England to a great crucible, or cal- 
dron, over which an unseen power presides, preparing a 
race for its place in history. At the fortunate time, this 
unseen power throws new elements into the caldron, — 
new races, new beliefs, new ideas; and these new elements, 
at first distinct, are gradually mingled with the old, until 
they are dissolved, and confusion is again succeeded by 
comparative unity. After such an interval of confusion 
and ferment, the Norman, too, was to be stirred in and 
absorbed. In the end he did not destroy the elements 
which had existed in the England of Alfred or Harold, but 
he greatly modified them by contributing something new 
to English life and literature. 

Who, then, were the Normans, and what did they con- 
tribute to the progress of English literature? The Nor- 
mans were originally a mixed horde of piratical 
' adventurers from Scandinavia and Denmark 
who had won a country for themselves in the North of 



74 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

France (911). They belonged to a restless, adventurous 
race, which terrorised Western Europe for three hundred 
years. Enterprising, quick-witted, open to new ideas, this 
race of born rulers did more than seize upon some of the 
fairest lands of Europe. Wherever it went, it appro- 
priated much that was best in the civilisation of those it 
subdued. True to their race, this was just what the Nor- 
mans did in France. They were rough sea-rovers when 
they won Normandy; kinsmen of the Danes who had 
plundered the English monasteries ; they were men of the 
North, sprung from the same race-stock as the English: 
yet they had been so changed by their contact with the 
Southern civilisation that when they conquered England 
scarcely an outward sign of their origin remained. They 
spoke a language of Southern origin, for, after they had 
established themselves in Normandy, they had rapidly 
acquired the corrupt Latin then spoken in their new home, 
and raised it to the new dignity of a literary language. 
They became Christians; they showed a liberal spirit 
towards learning, and they encouraged the great Italian 
scholars Lanfranc and Anselm to settle among them. 
They built splendid castles and cathedrals; their dress was 
more splendid than that of the English; their manners were 
more courtly; they were foremost in instituting chivalry. 
Their poets, or trouveres, chanted long, narrative poems of 
battle and knightly deeds, differing both in style and spirit 
from the old Teutonic poetry of the North. Such were 
the people that became the masters of England in 1066. 
The Normans brought so many new ideas and foreign 
fashions into England that, for a long time, there was 
Diversities in § rea ^ confusion and diversity, as many of the 
language and Englishmen were slow to give up the old ways. 
literature. g Q it happened that for some time after the 
Conquest there were two races in England, the Norman 
and English, separate, and yet forced into daily contact; 



LATIN WRITERS. 75 

two languages, Norman-French, the language of the 
ruling class, and English, the language of the people. 
Moreover, the Norman had his literature, written, of 
course, in his own tongue; while the Englishman still 
held to the literature of his fathers. Besides this, many 
scholars, English as well as Norman, wrote their prose 
books, and even some of their poetry, in Latin. There 
were two distinct literatures and three literary languages. 
Books in Norman-French and in Latin can hardly be 
called English Literature, but they are so intimately con- 
nected with England's literary development that we 
should know something of their general character. 

The Norman Conquest infused new life into the Church; 
it improved education, and created a revival of learning 

in England. England had long since lost her 
writeM. m intellectual leadership; and during the early 

part of the eleventh century, while learning 
languished in England, it had made rapid progress in 
the great schools of Normandy and France. After the 
Conquest, nearly all the great places in the Church were 
given to foreigners, men whose scholarship was generally 
far superior to that of the English prelates they super- 
seded. Thus the famous Italian scholar and writer Lan- 
franc (cir. 1005-1089) was taken from the monastic school 
at Bee, then famous for the part it was taking in the in- 
tellectual revival of Normandy, and made Archbishop of 
Canterbury. From Bee, too, came Anselm (1033-1109) 
to be Lanfranc's successor in the Archbishopric, a man of 
rare holiness, and one of the leading writers and thinkers 
of his age. English bishops were replaced by Normans, 
and the great monasteries were ruled by abbots of Nor- 
man, or Continental origin. When we reflect that nearly 
all the books were written by the clergy, that they were 
the recognised historians of the nation, and that the 
entire system of education was in their hands, we can see 



76 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

at once the importance of this change. During the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries a great many books were 
written in England by these foreign scholars and their 
pupils, — histories, biographies, and learned treatises on 
theological or even scientific subjects. But these men 
were scholars and Churchmen, and they wrote in Latin, 
the common language of scholarship and of the Church 
throughout Europe at that time. While, therefore, they 
did much to advance learning in England, their immediate 
effect on English literature, and especially on English 
prose, was distinctly unfavourable. Two centuries before 
the Conquest, King Alfred had tried to bring literature to 
the people by taking it out of Latin, the language . of the 
learned class, and making it English. In this truly great 
undertaking Alfred had been at least partially successful. 
But after the Conquest all this w T as changed. English 
was only the despised speech of the lower classes; these 
new scholars wrote for scholars, and Alfred's broadly 
democratic idea of literature as a possession of the people 
was utterly foreign to their character and tone of mind. 

Among the most important books in the mass of Anglo- 
Latin literature are those that deal with English history. 

During the twelfth century, in the hands of the 
Chroniclers S re8 ^ eT Latin historians, history ceases to be a dry 

and disconnected chronicle, and becomes a more 
orderly narrative, told with no little literary skill. Some 
attempt is made to show the underlying relation be- 
tween events and their causes, and greater attention is 
given to the portrayal of character. William of Malmes- 
bury (d. 1143?), one of the best of these Latin historians, 
was also one of the pioneers in this improved method of 
writing history. He was of mixed Norman and English 
descent, but he was Norman in his sympathies. He had . 
the advantage of being connected at different times with 
the two great Abbeys of Glastonbury and Malmesbury. 



GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH, 77 

His history of England is his most important work (Gesta 
Regum Anglorum and its sequel Historia Novella). He 
also wrote a life of Aldhelm, with whom, as we know, the 
greatness of Malmesbury Abbey began. 1 

Another of these monastic historians was Matthew Paris 
(d. 1259), who has been called the last and the greatest of 
them all. He was a monk in the ancient and 
Paris heW splendid Abbey of St. Albans, which was noted 
at that time for its art and learning. Especial 
attention was given there to the writing of history, and as 
a young man Matthew was carefully trained in its Scrip- 
torium, or room where manuscripts were copied and en- 
riched with painted designs. In time he rose to be the 
regular chronicler or historiographer of the abbey. Mat- 
thew Paris brought his history down to 1259, the year of his 
own death; and it is one of its greatest merits that in deal- 
ing with recent or contemporary events he endeavoured, 
as far as he could, to get at the facts for himself, by obser- 
vation, or by conversing with those who had seen or had 
taken part in the events he describes. He was well known 
to King Henry III., who often visited the abbey; and he 
had many friends among the great. Sometimes he left his 
devotions to witness a great court ceremony. His history 
is not a mere compilation from the old records ; he painted 
from life, and no doubt it is his knowledge of the great 
world outside the walls of his monastery that gives to his 
work its distinctive freshness and charm. 

A little apart from these later historians stands a writer 

whose fictions, put forth as history, produced more effect 

on literature than the sober truth. This was 

enwon^Eng- GrEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH (d. cir.-1154), whose 

lish literature, fabulous history of the early kings of Britain 

Monmouth. (H47) gave Europe new subjects for romance, 

and thus made an epoch in literary history. 

Geoffrey deals with a period of British history about which, 

1 See p. 58, supra. 



78 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

as he complains, Becle is silent . He tells us how Brutus, the 

descendant of the Trojan JSneas, came to Albion, or Bri- 
tain ; which was then inhabited by giants, and how he built 
a new Troy by the river Thames. In Geoffrey's account 
of the kings which succeeded Brutus, occur names and 
stories which were destined to become a part of the world's 
literature. We find the story of Sahrina, the nymph of the 
Severn; the story of King Lear and his daughters; the story 
of Ferrex and Porrex, which was made the subject of the 
earliest English tragedy; above all, we find the story of King 
Arthur. In Geoffrey's book these wonderful stories appear 
in a comparatively brief and prosaic form. The story of 
Arthur, in particular, is very different from that with which 
we are familiar. As we shall see, it was reserved for others 
to lift Geoffrey's rather involved and matter-of-fact record 
into the magical world of romance, and to elevate Arthur 
into the heroic pattern of mediaeval knighthood. But to 
Geoffrey belongs the honour of the pioneer. He was not a 
great genius/ but he wrote in a popular and entertaining 
style. He brought these stories out of obscurity; he -put 
them into Latin, the common language of the educated, 
and so gave them to Europe. 

Many tilings appear to have contributed to fit Geoffrey 
for such a task. He himself was in all likelihood of Welsh 

descent. He lived in the Welsh Marches, for 
Marches . Monmout lishir e did not become an English county 

until four hundred years after his time. He was 
thus at the meeting-place of three races, for here in the 
southern part of Wales, Englishmen, Norman, and Celt met 
on common ground. He lived, too, in one of the districts 
especially associated with memories of the great British 
king. A little south of Monmouth lay Caerleon, Caerleon- 
upon-Usk, once a famous British stronghold, where tra- 
dition said that Arthur held his court. We do not know 
how far Geoffrey used these local legends in compiling his 



CELTIC INFLUENCE. 79 

•'history," but we do know that he lived and wrote sur- 
rounded by the romantic associations of a Celtic past, in 
that border region which was the meeting-place of Welsh 
fable and Norman culture. 

The influence of this Celtic, or partially Celtic, western 
district on English literature is not seen in Geoffrey of 
Monmouth alone. Wales, and the shires along 
writers^ 1811 ^ s borders, produced several other writers dur- 
ing the latter half of the twelfth century that 
left an impress on English literary history. From 
this Celtic West came Walter Map (1140?-1210?) and 
Gerald de Barri, or Geraldus Cambrensis (1146?-1220), 
both distinguished wits and scholars at the court of King 
Henry II. Map was a Welshman, and "almost certainly 
a native of Hertfordshire." He wrote Latin poems, and 
is thought to have had a share in the building up of the 
great romance of King Arthur. Gerald de Barri was born 
in Wales on the south coast of Pembrokeshire. He was of 
mixed Norman and Welsh descent; indeed, he was the 
great-grandson of one of the Welsh Princes. Among his 
works is an account of a trip he made to Wales (Itinerarium 
Cambrice, 1191) as the emissary of King Henry II. An- 
other more important writer from this Celtic district was 
Layamon, whom we shall meet later as the author of the 
first notable poem written in the English language after 
the Norman Conquest. The importance of the Celtic 
element in English literature has already been alluded 
to, and the influence of the Welsh and their literature 
at this time is a good illustration of this fundamental 
fact. 

To the Norman influence on English literature, there 
was thus added the influence of the Celt. Without imply- 
ing that the second of these two influences was equal in 
importance to the first, we may safely say that, as the 
coming of the Norman was the feature of English literary 



so 



normal : ::' :; 



CHATCEIL 



historv 



mina :: the Celt 



was tne great : 7 mare ■:: 
There vere many ::' 

:he twelfth and thirtee: 
mentioned 1 
:•: rrmemhe: 

after the X:::.-- a ! n 

literature in England. 

written in Latin: that s 



prcse 
in the 
Chaw 



etrv as —ell 



Tie K: 



lancLth 



and 



very 

lack o: 



centuries ^as :: be a lea 
medern Z'.n :;e. 
Between the eleventh 

Nmman r-ts rtmms- 



-r mamrtam La:;:: writers during 
h lemaries. tat they need n:: he 
re. The important thing for us 
s that for three or four centuries 
aest the greet rail: :: the via- 
nd eve- some of the verse, was 
the serious thinkers of the nation 
at (with the single exception of 
aril 7 aa mtahle ::ie:e ;: English 
men the mmiug :: the N: ramus 
:.aaa century ana :ir ~m:m :: 
a latter hah :■: :1: mmteemh. 
i,s :he s:m:larshm :: Xcrmamdy 
lie train of the Conqueror. This 
I from the Old English poetry in 
m ":: :th the time ana the meaner 
?tion worked toother to make it 
ial. When it was brought to Eng- 
11 English was over; while, 

:eat reri: a ::' Xirrnan z : rry haa 
spirit that had produced Beowulf 
I spent, the Nor: nans were fast 
i a! production. S : at the 
igusa aaa "a- tmaaamg ::r 
i :aaaaa e ne~ :: retry, m rr 
ana :-: : a sale. England 

ition which during the next twe 
aer in the literary development of 

and the fourteenth centuries, the 

a a great many long, narrative 

mum. inspired the love of 

:riae in her trimmahs. tell c: the 



ARTHURIAN LEGENDS. 81 

deeds of Charlemagne and his knights, — of " Roland and 
of Oliver;" some of them are founded on classic stories, 
and go back to Thebes or Troy; while one large and impor- 
tant group, or cycle, of poems, deals with the British King 
Arthur and with the various adventures of his Knights. 

Other long poems of this period were simply 

histories in verse. The Roman de Rou (or 
Romance of Rollo), for instance, recounts the history of 
the Normans from the conquest of Normandy by Rollo to 
the early part of the reign of Henry I. As a rule, these 
poems, whether they are romances or histories, are of 
prodigious length, some of them reaching ten, twenty, 
or even thirty thousand lines. One of them is said to be 
sixty thousand lines long, or nearly six times as long as 
Paradise Lost. They show the easy flow of words that is 
characteristic of the Norman and the Celtic genius, but 
which is distinctly un-English. While they tell the story 
pleasantly and fluently, these Norman poets have the 
lightness of the Frenchman and the Celt; their genius is 
more lively and flexible than that of the English, but it 
lacks that gloomy intensity, that depth and concentrated 
power, which is distinctively Teutonic. At first, as in 
the famous Song of Roland, the chief theme of their poems 
was battle and knightly heroism, but, as the institution 
of chivalry developed, love entered more and more largely 
into their themes, and the Arthurian romances are full of 
that romantic sentiment, that union of romantic love, 
religion, and chivalric 'prowess, which is peculiarly asso- 
ciated with the Middle Ages. 

The Arthurian legends furnished a theme well suited to 
the spirit of the time; and when Geoffrey of Monmouth 

showed the way to the rich stores of Celtic poetry 
nan legends. an ^ romance, the poets were not slow to follow 

him. It is said that within twenty years after 
the appearance of his "history," the British heroes had 



82 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

become "household names throughout Europe," and that 
" by the close of the twelfth century nearly every existing 
literature had assimilated and reproduced the story of 

Arthur and his knights."' : Geofrey's legendary srery :: 
Britain was rn into French verse by Geoffrey Gadiah. s 
Norman irowere. Then Wage, another try. rev. retold it 
with sundry additions lido . and mesemeel his booh to 
Quern Eleanor, the wife of Henry II. A: mm Arthurs 
reign was made merely an epise :le in the hist 'try of Britain: 

elements were constantly added, other stories were inter- 
woven with .he original theme, ami the her i -him :: fw 
tain became the central rlgum in a great cycle of romance. 
Many elements contributed to its making. The adven- 
ture us and chivalrous spirit of the Normans was combined 
with that sense of beauty, vender, and mystery which 
distinguishes the Celt. The Arthurian romances do not 
show knighthood as it was. — it was te : iften warse. bru- 
tal, and cruel, — em they be show as the ideal of chivalry. 
the pattern of the true knight, We hnd Latmcelot and 
Tristram setting an earthly eassion before anything else in 
life, but we hnd also the soldier-saint Sir Percival: we hnd 
men whose trade is war starring in search of the Holv 
Grail the ceo: used at the Last Sumeer . the mvsucal sign 
of the Divine presence. With such strangely' contrasted 
elements there are mingled fragments of ancient heathen- 
ism, of the ch:i magi: and mystery of the Celt : — the white- 
bearded enchanter Merlin, the magi: sword wrought by 
the Lady of the Lake, the mysterious land of Lyonesse. 
and Avalon, where Arthur awaits the hour of his re- 
turn. 
English literature was affected, although to a far less 

1 Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, p. 2S9. 



LITERATURE IN ENGLISH. 83 

degree, by the poetry of other parts of France. The love- 
lyrics of the troubadours, the poets of the South 

™e5y FrenCl1 as tile troupes were of tne North, were not 
unknown in England. Richard I. (1189-1199) 

was himself a troubadour, and delighted in the southern or 

Provence poetry. 1 
Looking at this Anglo-Norman literature as a whole, 

whether in Latin or in Norman-French, we must remem- 
ber that while it is foreign or un-English in Ian- 

Summary. . . -i— , •■ . •. 

guage, a part of it was written by Englishmen, 
or by men of Anglo-Norman descent. Many of the Latin 
chroniclers were Englishmen, although they wrote under 
the influence of the Norman culture, and so late as the four- 
teenth century we find the English poet John Gower writ- 
ing a great part of his poetry in French. Many of the 
French Romances were translated into English prose; 
while, on the other hand, an English original seems to have 
been the basis of the French Romance of Havelock the 
Dane (Le Lai de Haveloc). In this way each literature 
supplied something to the other ; and all through this con- 
fused period of borrowing and adapting, of translating and 
retranslating, the romantic sentiment, the chivalric spirit, 
the foreign poetic forms, of the Norman were being appro- 
priated by the English and gradually made a part of the 
literary wealth of the whole nation. Politically the 
Norman conquered England; but in fact, during the two 
centuries that followed Hastings, England conquered the 
Norman, absorbing his good qualities without losing her 
own, taking for her use such materials for her language and 
literature as pleased her, yet keeping the essence of her 
language and her national genius essentially unchanged. 
Chaucer in the latter part of the fourteenth century was 

1 Pleaders of Scott will remember the introduction of the trouvere 
Blondel in The Talisman, and the presentation of Richard as a patron of 
poetry. See especially chap. xxvi. 



84 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAFCER. 

the heir c: this mixture :: the Norman and the English. 
and in his poetry we see that the union of the two races, 
the two languages and the two literatures, is ora:ti:ally 
complete. 

For nearly a century and a half after the Norman Con- 
quest (1066-cir. 1205 very little of any importance was 
Literature™ written in the English language. French was 
English the language :: the Court, of the great nobles, 

1066-1205, ,..--. . , . ° u i ■ 

ot polite s: uety: it was taught in the schools, it 
was used in the law courts; Latin was the language of the 
learned, and if a man w :ul 1 gain the ear of the upper classes 
he must write in French or in Latin. The " low men/" the 
great uneducated mass of the people, held to their mother- 
tongue with a true English tenacity; but some Englishmen 
not only learned to speak French, but wrote in French and 
in Latin. Yet while English was very far from holding the 
first place in Englani as a literary language, even during 
the twelfth century it was not entirely crowded out by its 
more fashionable rivals, but was rather stubbornly hold- 
ing its own until better times. Thus the twelfth century 
was more than half over before the old custom of chron- 
icling the natic n's hist i y in English was finally abandoned 
1154 . A few )ther works in English have come down to 
us from this time, sermons, or occasional poems, us jafly :: 
a religious or didactic character. Yet, when we have 
pieced together such relics of an English literature as a 
diligent search can discover, the result is meagre enough 
beside the great volume of French and Latin which were 
the real literary languages of the time. 

But at the opening :: the thirteenth centurv 

The revival , U . -^ i- * i • i 

of English Tn ^ &-* 5i£^ —a: --^ Engusn .anguage is oe- 
literafare in gi nnin g to win back its literarv importance. A 

thirteenth ■. . . -tj 

eentnry. e*e-<u wiaugp iu lue puiuiLai uiipor unite ui mug 

land, at the beginning of that centurv. nu 



the beginning o: a new e;: : :h. For one hundred and forty 



MYAMON. 85 

years England had been ruled by foreign kings. Now, 
in 1204, King John lost nearly all his lands on the Continent, 
a territory comprising three-fifths of modern France. Eng- 
land could no longer be regarded as the dependency of a for- 
eign power ; it was the chief, almost the only dependency of 
the crown, free once more to follow the bent of its own genius. 
When John lost Normandy, the antagonism between the 
English and the Normans had already disappeared. For 
generations they had lived together in the same island; 
they had intermarried ; they had fought side by side against 
a foreign enemy; many Normans had learned to speak 
English, and many English could both speak and write in 
French. Now, cut off from the rest of the world, they 
were to draw even closer together, and force the Great 
Charter of liberty from their king. 

Some time during these early years of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, English poetry, which had showed but little sign of 
life since the Song on the Battle of Maldon (991), 
ayamon. su ddenly revived in the Brut 1 of Layamon (cir. 
1205). The end of a foreign rule in England and the re- 
birth of a true English poetry are thus almost exactly con- 
temporaneous. All that we know of Layamon, he tells us 
himself in the opening lines of his poem. He was a parish 
priest in North Worcestershire, and dwelt at Earnley (now 
Ernley Regis) on the banks of the river Severn. There 
"came to him in mind and in his chief thought that he 
would of England tell the noble deeds." So he got books, 
among others the Brut "of the French Clerk that was 
named Wace," and retold in English the legendary history 
of Britain. Layamon tells us very little about himself, 

1 Brut = Brutus, who, according to the fabulous accounts of Geoffrey 
of Monmouth and others, was the great grandson of iEneas and the 
founder of New Troy or London. The recitals of British legends were 
commonly given this name (as Wace's Brut d' Angleterre) t and the word 
Brut came to mean chronicle. 



86 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

yet his few words make him very real and human to us. 
No one who loves books will doubt that this country priest 
was a true book-lover. He tells us that he had " to take a 
wide journey over the land" to obtain "the noble books" 
which he "took for a pattern." We may imagine him re- 
turning in triumph with his treasures to his quiet home by 
the Severn, and settling to work with a tranquil mind. 
"Layamon laid down these books and turned the leaves, 
he beheld them lovingly. May the Lord be merciful to 
him! Pen he took with his fingers and wrote a book skin, 
and the true words set together, and the three books com- 
pressed into one." Layamon speaks of using three books, 

but he relied chiefly on one. His Brut,- a metri- 
Bnrt m ° n 8 cal chronicle of the legendary history of Britain, is 

based mainly on Wace's book, as Wace's Brut was 
based on the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth. There is 
a vein of true poetry in it, unwieldy as it seems, and it is 
notable as marking the entrance of many famous stories 
into English, literature. Let us look for a moment at the 
significance of this extraordinary poem. From one aspect 
it is almost like a voice from the England of Csedmon or 
of Cynewulf. Its vocabulary is almost wholly English, as 
hardly fifty words of French origin are to be found in its 
thirty thousand lines. 1 At times we recognise the true 
fighting spirit of the old English battle-song. Yet, from 
another aspect, the poem bears witness to the influence of 
those foreign elements which had already entered deeply 
into English life and literature. Layamon lived near the 
Welsh border, and there, where the land of the Englishman 
almost touched the land of the Celt, he pondered over a 
Norman's version of a Celtic legend. Lay anion's chief ma- 
terial is thus not English, but Norman or Celtic; and his 

1 This computation was made by Sir F. Madden, the editor of the 
standard edition of Layamon, and it is based on an examination of the 
earlier of the two extant versions of the poem. 



ORMULUM AND ANCREN RIWLE. 87 

theme is not the glory of English, but of British heroes. 
It would be hard to find a better example of the singular 
fusion of languages and literatures. A Norman trouvere 
and an English poet vie with each other in singing the 
praises of British Kings. The stories, which Wace the 
Norman had taken from Geoffrey the Welshman, are now 
retold by Layamon the Englishman. Three men, of three 
races, recite the Brut ; each uses a different language, — 
the Welshman, Latin; the Norman, French; until finally 
the work is taken up by the Englishman, and this foreign 
material is made contributory to English literature. 

Two other books may be associated with Layamon's 
poem, as illustrations of this advance of the English 
Ormuium language in literary importance. These are the 
and Ancren Ormuium (cir. 1215), and the Ancren Riwle, or 
Rule of Anchoresses (cir. 1225). The Ormuium 
takes its name from its author, a monk named Orm or 
Ormi. 

"Thiss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum, 
Forrthi thatt Orrm itt wrohhte." 

(This book is named Ormuium, 
For that Orm it wrought.) 

It consists of a paraphrase in English verse of those 
parts of the New Testament that were appointed to be 
used in the sermons of the Church, followed by a short 
sermon, also in verse, on each selection. Its author has 
been led to think that great profit would follow if English 
folk would learn and follow this service. The Church 
services were in Latin, and this is but one among many 
attempts to familiarise the people with the Bible. 1 The 
Ancren Riwle is a manual, or book of good counsel, pre- 

1 The Ormuium may be compared with Keble's The Christian Year 
(1827). This is a series of poems on the more important services of 
the English Church throughout the year, arranged in the order of their 
occurrence. 



88 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

pared for three nuns who lived in a monastery in Dorset- 
shire. 

We have seen that during the twelfth century nearly 
all the poetry in England was French both in language 
French lit- an d form. During the thirteenth and four- 
eraturein teenth centuries, a number of these French, or 
Anglo-Norman, poems were imitated or repro- 
duced in English. Apparently there was an increasingly 
large number of people in England, who, while they en- 
joyed the French Romances, preferred to hear them in 
English. In this way the Anglo-Norman poetry, which, 
although produced in England, was foreign rather than 
national, now became incorporated with English literature. 
This absorption of the French, or Anglo-Norman, literature 
by the English is one of the features of the literary history 
of this time. Just as Layamon at the beginning of the 
thirteenth century put the French chronicle of Wace into 
English, with certain additions of his own, so a little later 
various French romances of the preceding century began 
to reappear in an English dress. Some of these English 
romances, such as Havelok the Dane (cir. 1270-1280), Guy 
of Warwick (cir. 1300), and Bevis of Hampton, are founded 
on Norman versions of Danish or English themes. Have- 
lock, Sir Guy, and Sir Bevis are local heroes, and in these 
romances the story of their deeds comes back into English 
by way of the French. Some romances, on the other hand, 
are taken from stories that are French in origin. But 
it is not only in the metrical romances that we see the 
traces of the French influence; we see it on every side 
colouring English poetry with softer and brighter hues, and 
moulding it into new forms. The Owl and the Nightin- 
gale (cir. 1220), a poem in which the two birds dispute 
about the merits of their different ways of living, follows 
the fashion of a class of poetry then popular in Southern 
France. Another poem, The Land of Cockaigne (later 



ENGLISH SONGS. 89 

thirteenth century), a clever satire on the gluttony and 
indulgence of the monks, has a cynical wit that suggests 
the livelier genius of the Norman. 

The English songs, too, some of which have a wonder- 
ful grace and melody, certainly owe much to French and 
foreign influences. Some of these are religious; 
songs 8 hymns to the Virgin full of a warmth of adora- 

tion which is not English but Southern. Some 
are war-songs, and they show how the people were begin- 
ning to make themselves heard and felt after the great 
contest with the king in the Barons' War. Others, again, 
are songs of love and springtime, so true and beautiful, that 
we, reading them after six hundred years, can still feel the 
quick pulse of youth and gladness beat in them. Perhaps 
the most beautiful of these love-songs is the one to 
Alysoun : 

" Between soft March and April showers, 
When sprays of bloom from branches spring, 
And when the little bird 'mid flowers 
Doth song of sweetness, loudly sing: 
To her with longing love I cling, 
Of all the world the fairest thing, 
Whose thrall I am, who bliss can bring, 
And give to me life's crown. 
A gracious fate to me is sent ; 
Methinks it is by heaven lent ; 
From women all, my heart is bent, 
To light on Alysoun." 1 

These lines have a delicate and dreamy beauty, a grace 
and sentiment, which we cannot but feel has been learned 
from England's foreign masters. But on the other hand 
we must not conclude that all these English songs were 
but mere echoes of the French. There is good reason to 
believe that there was a popular poetry among the English 

1 I have preferred to quote Ten Brink's admirable modernised 
version. The poem is accessible in its earlier form in The Oxford Book 
of English Verse, and Chambers's New Encyclopedia of Eng. Lit. 



90 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

which the coming of the Norman invaders did not destroy. 
It is true that those thirteenth-century songs which have 
been written down and preserved are not of this popular 
character. They are suggestive of the art of the Norman, 
or, perhaps, their verse is the echo of some Latin drinking- 
song learned by English students at the University of 
Paris. Yet even in these songs scholars have found here 
and there a strain that seems to have been taken from the 
poetry of the people. In one of the thirteenth-century 
love-songs, for instance, there is a refrain not easily for- 
gotten, — superior, I think, in grace and melody to all 
the rest of the poem: 

"Blow, Northern wind, 
Send thou me my sweeting, 
Blow, Northern wind, blow, blow, blow!" 

Now competent scholars believe that this was not in- 
vented by the poet, but borrowed from some old popular 
song. 1 The famous Cuckoo Song (cir. 1250), which is 
redolent of the homely, wholesome life of farmyard and 
pasture, is thought to echo the refrain of a popular dance- 
song: 

"Summer is a-coming in, 
Loud sing cuckoo: 
Groweth seed and bloweth mead, 
And springeth the wood new. 
Sing cuckoo, cuckoo. 

Ewe bleateth after lamb, 

Cow after calf calls, 

Bullock sterteth, buck verteth, 

Merry sing cuckoo, 

Cuckoo, cuckoo, well sings the cuckoo. 

So sweet you never knew, 

Sing cuckoo, now sing cuckoo." 2 

1 Ten Brink: Early Eng. Lit. p. 305, Bonn's ed. See also Professor 
Gummere's comment on Ten Brink's view in The Beginnings of Poetry, 
and Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time, vol. i. p. 24. The song 
is given in Wright's Specimens of Lyric Poetry, No. 16, and in The 
Oxford Book of Verse. 
2 Given in its original form in Ten Brink's Early Eng. Lit. 1 p. 305. 



LITERATURE OF THE PEOPLE. 91 

But after all the really important matter is not whether 
a certain refrain, or a certain lyric shows the influence of 

the folk-song; the really vital fact is the exist- 
uterature* 1 ence at tms ^ me °^ a truly popular literature. 

A great literature is built upon the broad and 
solid basis of a national appreciation. Almost invariably 
it is the supreme literary expression of thoughts, feelings, 
and tastes that are very widely diffused. The fact that 
from an indefinitely early period English literature has such 
a popular basis, is therefore a matter of real moment ; for 
on this almost unseen foundation the literary triumphs of a 
later time were largely based. During these centuries that 
were preparing the way for Chaucer and for Shakespeare, 
the people of England had their songs, their ballads, and 
their drama. 

Just as the English people — the ploughmen and shep- 
herds, sailors and artisans — held stubbornly to their own 

mother-English after the advent of the Nor- 
of the°pe^pie. man > so, beyond any reasonable doubt, they 

sang the old songs of their fathers and made 
new ones. Their songs were outside the formal bounds 
of literature, the wildflowers of the field and forest, not 
the carefully tended plants of the garden. For we must 
remember that poetry was not then shut up in print, as it 
now is. Then it was not merely the possession of a culti- 
vated minority, not merely a thing to be read in a library 
or studied in a school. It was a possession of the people; 
it was a thing not of the eye merely, but also of the ear. 
Thousands sang songs, who could not write nor read them, 
and men and women worked and played to their singing, 
and danced to it under the open sky. If we would get a 
true picture of the England of those days, we must indeed 
imagine the monk in his scriptorium bending over his parch- 
ments; we must imagine the jongleur, in the castle-hall 
singing his high-flown romances of love and chivalry; but 



92 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

we must not forget the toilers who had little to do with this 
world of luxury and of art. To complete the picture we 
must imagine the villagers singing their songs of harvest, 
the sailors chanting their rhythmic chorus, the women sing- 
ing at their spinning, and the j^ouths and maidens singing 
and dancing to welcome the return of spring. 1 

In some of these dance-songs, or ballads, a simple story 
was told in a simple and popular form of verse. 2 The word 

_ „ _ ballad is a vague one, since it includes sons:s of 

Ballads. ° ' ° 

various kinds. But when we speak of the " old/"' 
or "popular ballads," we commonly mean short, narrative 
poems, adapted to singing, that have grown up among the 
people. Such famous ballads as Chevy Chase, the Robin 
Hood ballads, belong to this class. Now while nearly all 
the "old ballads" that have been written down and pre- 
served, are probably later than the thirteenth century, at 
least in the form in which we possess them, there is good 
reason to think that ballads of the same, or of a similar, 
character were made and simg by the people of England 
and Scotland from a very early time. In the words of a 
very high authority : " There is ample evidence for the an- 
tiquity of the popular ballads in England. Indeed, there 
is no difficulty in proving beyond a reasonable doubt that 
there were ballads in plenty from the dawn of English his- 
tory (not to speak of what lies before this epoch) down to 
the seventeenth century when printed and written docu- 
ments begin to abound." 3 We must think, then, of the 

1 This may seem fanciful, but it is, I believe, not far from the truth. 
A little regulated imagination probably brings us much closer to the 
facts in this matter than we should get by ignoring or denying every- 
thing not susceptible of absolute demonstration. See Wright's Politi- 
cal Songs of England, "Preface." x. 

2 Ballad, from Low Lat. ballare to dance. For the derivation and 
various meanings of this word, see Cent. Diet., "ballad" and "ball." 

3 Professor G. L. Kittredge's "Introduction" to English and Scottish 
Popular Ballads, Cambridge ed. 



BALLAD AND DRAMA. 93 

ballad as a part of the life of the people in the thirteenth, 
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Many of these ballads 
are lost, but we have enough to show that in them the 
soul of the people struggled for expression. In them were 
told brief or simple stories of faithful or faithless lovers, of 
ghosts and fairies, of battle, and of brave exploits. In 
them we see the epic and romance of the people; we see 
a sense of the loveliness of nature, and of the wonder, the 
poetry, and tragedy of human life, uttering itself perhaps 
crudely or coarsely, but often, if we may judge from those 
ballads which remain to us, with a remarkable truth and 
power. 

The third form of the popular literature was the reli- 
gious drama, the miracle plays, or mysteries. It will be 

more convenient for us to speak of these plays 
drama. gl ° U8 ^ ev on m connection with the after history of 

the drama, but we must not forget that chrono- 
logically these religious plays belong to the period we are 
now considering. Passing over the earlier plays in French 
or Latin, we must note here that from the end of the 
thirteenth and through the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 
turies, these religious plays were made in English, and 
produced by and for the people. To understand the full 
significance of this, we must not regard these plays merely 
as preludes to the Shakespearean drama, as w T e are so apt 
to do. To actor and audience these plays were not a 
preparation for some unimagined drama of the future; 
they were an end in themselves. We should go back 
to these centuries in imagination and see these religious 
plays in their true relation to the ballad and the song, as 
one great channel through wmich the soul of the masses 
found literary expression. 

Even a brief review of literature during the centuries 
immediately following the Norman Conquest increases 
our appreciation of the immense importance of that event 



94 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

in its relations to literary history. Clearly, without the 

Summary. Norman the language and the literature of Eng- 
ine effects land from the twelfth century to the thirteenth 
t <. e °v1 would have been entirely different, and almost 

quest on lit- J ' 

erature and certainly poorer, heavier, duller, and more con- 
language, tracted. This becomes more apparent when we 
enumerate the chief effects of the Conquest on literature 
and language, and try to review it in its broadest relations 
to the nation's intellectual growth. 

I. The Norman Conquest brought England into direct 
contact with a Continental and superior civilisation. For 
nearly one hundred and fifty 7 years after William's victory 
at Senlac, England was a dependency of one of the most 
cultured and progressive nations in Europe. During this 
long period of political union, when kings and prelates, 
nobles, scholars, and poets, were passing back and forth 
between Normandy and England, the language, the art, 
the learning, and the literature of the foreigners were being 
absorbed by the English and made subservient to their 
national growth. 

II. The Norman civilisation was not Teutonic and North- 
ern but essentially Latin and Southern in character. Thus 

for the second time England moved forward under the pressure 
of Latin culture. Throughout nearly all its long history 
the literary genius of England has been kindled or sustained 
by that of two races very different from that of her own, 
the Latin and the Celt. The first definite beginning of lit- 
erature in England, it will be remembered, was a response to 
the introduction of Christianity and Latin culture by the 
Roman and Celtic missionaries; another period of literary 
advance followed a second infusion of Latin civilization. 
Great as is the contrast between the two men, there is 
one striking point of similarity between the work that St 
Augustine and that William the Conqueror did for England. 

III. The foreign influence brought in by the Norman came 



RESULTS OF NORMAN CONQUEST. 95 

when England stood in need of a fresh inspiration. ■ Nearly 
five hundred years stretch between the landing of St. Au- 
gustine and the landing of William, and the impulse given 
to English thought in the seventh century had lost much 
of its force. As an outlying island, on the edge of Western 
Europe, England was constantly in danger of falling be- 
hind; she was in need of an occasional stimulus of foreign 
thought to prevent her from lapsing into an intellectual 
stagnation, or from becoming narrow and insular in mind. 
As the eleventh century advances, the need of such an in- 
tellectual renewal becomes increasingly apparent. The old 
poetry is worn out and practically abandoned, and the 
new poetry has not come. Learning and religion languish. 
Indeed, there is no reason to doubt the substantial truth of 
William of Malmesbury's words: "Nevertheless, in process 
of time, the desire after literature and religion had decayed; 
for several years before the arrival of the Normans, the 
clergy, contented with a very slight degree of learning, 
could scarcely stammer out the words of the sacraments, 
and a person who understood grammar was an object of 
wonder and astonishment." 1 

IV. The new impulse given by Latin culture was followed 
by an advance in learning, art, and literature. To what has 
already been said upon this advance, we must add a few 
words upon the great improvement in architecture that 
followed in the wake of the Norman. The foreign eccle- 
siastics, who poured into England in the train of the Con- 
queror, had a passion for building and a contempt for the 
ruder work of their Saxon predecessors. During the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a great many of the old 
churches and cathedrals were torn down and replaced by 
new and more splendid structures, until at last, not a single 
great church of the earlier times was left. In the twelfth 
century, the Cistercian monks came to England and built 
1 Gesta Regum Anglorum (trans, by J. A. Gates, London, 1847). 



96 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

many beautiful abbeys. A large part of the religious as- 
piration, the awe, and the love of beauty, was given a tan- 
gible form in these great poems in stone. Such noble 
buildings as the great cathedrals of Lincoln and Canter- 
bury and Westminster Abbey were the gift of the Norman, 
and such great works have long been a part of the spiritual 
inheritance of the English people. While we can only 
glance at this effect of the Norman Conquest, it is one that 
no student of English literature can afford to ignore. With- 
out these great buildings England would have been poorer 
in one great incentive to high emotion. For centuries they 
have brought into the daily life of the stolid Englishman 
the consecration of then beauty and their majestic repose. 
And when the soul of the youthful Milton is stirred by the 
grandeur of — 

"The high embowed roof 

With antick pillars massy proof," 

or when Wordsworth records his meditations among the 
ruins of the Cistercian Abbey of Tintern, we feel that these 
things are surface indications of the profound and subtle 
influence of great architecture on great literature, an in- 
fluence which can never be measured. 

V. The introduction of a new poetic form. English poe- 
try, as has been said, yielded to the influence of the French, 
and the romances of the Norman reappeared in an English 
dress. Beowulf and Csedmon were forgotten, and new 
English versions of the songs of the trouveres ruled in then- 
place. But not only did the French alter the subjects and 
spirit of English poetry, but also through them a great 
change took place in its outward form and structure. The 
old English device of alliteration as a necessary part of 
poetic form was gradually abandoned for the French fash- 
ion of rhyme, although the use of the accent, a characteristic 
feature of the English versification, was retained in a 



THE MAKING OF THE LANGUAGE. 97 

developed form. Alliterative poems were written so late as 
the fourteenth century; and, although it was given up as an 
essential structural part of English verse after that time, 
the poets still frequently introduced it at their pleasure, 
often with brilliant results. Nevertheless, while some traces 
of it remained, the system of Anglo-Saxon versification 
passed away forever under the pressure of Norman fashions, 
and a new versification took place, formed to a large ex- 
tent after the models of the Latin and French. 

VI. The enrichment and modification of the English lan- 
guage by its mixture with the Norman-French. Not the 
least important consequence of the Norman Conquest was 
the change it made in the national language. With this 
change the fortunes of the literature were inseparably con- 
nected. Words are the material with which the literary 
artist works; they are to the writer what color or stone 
are to the painter or the sculptor, and the effects produced 
by the writer must depend to no small extent upon the 
quality and the resources of the language he has at his 
command. The nature of the language at the com- 
mand of the English writer was practically settled dur- 
ing the three centuries that followed the Conquest, and 
it was settled for all time. Was the England of 
the future to be a French-speaking or an English- 
speaking nation? Was the genius of Shakespeare and of 
Milton, of Wordsworth and of Tennyson, to have as its 
appointed instrument of expression a language essentially 
English, or essentially French? By the end of the four- 
teenth century the triumph of English was reasonably cer- 
tain; and the English language, now known and spoken in 
almost every corner of the earth, had begun to assume its 
present form. The result of the struggle between the two 
rival languages is manifestly so important that we must 
indicate briefly how it came about. For some two hun- 
dred years after the Conquest, or until the early part of the 



98 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

thirteenth century, the Norman-French and the English 
remained separate and distinct. French, as we have seen, 
had at once taken the first place as the language of poetry. 
To speak French was a mark of social distinction; it was 
the language of the king and his nobles, as well as of the 
Norman retainers and domestics, and of innumerable for- 
eign officials. It became the language of the law-courts, 
and it was employed in the schools. English was de- 
spised as the barbarian speech of a conquered race. Many 
of the English themselves learned to speak French, and in- 
deed a knowledge of it must have been almost indispen- 
sable to social standing or political preferment. On the 
other hand, many of the Normans learned to understand 
and even to speak English, finding such a knowledge use- 
ful in their daily contact with the mass of the people. In 
this way it came about that there were numbers, both 
among the English and the Normans, who could speak both 
French and English, and who adapted their language to 
those with whom they happened to converse. Meanwhile 
the original antagonism between the two races rapidly dis- 
appeared. Intermarriages, except between the highest 
classes, became common; and after the accession of Henry 
II. (1154-1189), or in less than a century after the Con- 
quest, the marked distinctions between Normans and 
Englishmen had been almost entirely effaced. But while 
the two races were thus drawing closer together, two cir- 
cumstances combined to give the French language an 
increased importance. The first of these was the establish- 
ment of the house of Anjou on the English throne. Henry 
II. and his immediate successors were masters, directly or 
indirectly, of the greater part of France, and England was 
thus joined not only to Normandy, but also to many other 
French possessions. England was by no means the largest 
part of the king's dominions, and French was the native 
language of the people in most of the countries over which 



THE MAKING OF THE LANGUAGE. 99 

he ruled. While the English were thus brought closer to 
the foreign nobles and to French-speaking populations of 
the Continent, French literature, and particularly French 
poetry, was rapidly growing in influence and importance. 
The popularity of the French poetry in England, and the 
neglect and decadence of the native verse, tended to con- 
firm the supremacy of the French language, but, in spite of 
all this, the bulk of the English people, with a true British 
conservatism, kept doggedly to the use of their mother- 
tongue. 

When England was joined to the Continent by the Nor- 
man Conquest, it was as though a bridge had been laid 
across the channel by which French and Latin 

S^igST 11 culture could P ass over ; wnen Kin g Jonn lost 

nearly all of his Continental possessions at the 
beginning of the thirteenth century, it was as though that 
bridge had been broken down. The loss of Normandy 
suddenly ended a connection between England and 
Europe that had lasted for nearly one hundred and 
fifty years. The steady influx of French influence 
was thus cut off; insular England was suddenly thrown 
once more upon her own resources, transformed at a 
stroke from the province of a French-speaking nation 
to an independent island power. Henceforth England 
was to be "for the English," and such a change was 
bound to promote a general adoption of the English speech. 
This result, while it was certain to come, came slowly. We 
have already seen how during the thirteenth century the 
books written in English increased in numbers and in vol- 
ume, how French romances reappeared in an English dress, 
and how the dominant spirit of the time was a defiant 
hatred of foreign aggression and of papal interference, of 
foreign favourites of the king, and a patriotic devotion to 
the liberties of England. "The English were despised like 
dogs," wrote a poet after the victory of the people at Lewes, 



100 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

" but now they have lifted up their heads and their foes are 
vanquished." 

Nevertheless the French language retained much of its 
social and literary importance. It is probable indeed 
that BngHsh was steadily gaining ground; but Robert of 
Gloucester, writing towards the end of the thirteenth cen- 
could yet declare that "unless a man knows 
French, he is little thought of. But low men keep to Eng- 
lish and their own speech still." ■ During the early half of 
the fourteenth century this stubborn "holding to English'' 
on the part of the great mass of the population had secured 
the ultimate triumph of the native speech. The Hundred 
Years' V\"ar against France, begun in 1336 while Edward 
III. was on the throne, probably helped to bring French 
into disfav ; ur, and to promote the more general adoption of 
English. After 1349 English instead of French began to 
be used in the schools as the medium of instruction. In 
1362 Parliament passed an act providing that the plead- 
ings in the law-courts should thenceforth be in English, 
'"because the laws, customs, and statutes, of this realm, 
be not commonly known in the same realm for that they be 
pleaded; showed, and judged in the French tongue." The 
rising spirit of independence that had characterised the 
thirteenth century, the severance from France, followed 
by actual war upon her. increased the popularity of the 
English speech. 

Men recognised the claims oi English upon their pa- 
triotism. One author in the early hah" of the fourteenth 
century declares: 

"High: is :::i: I^glisiie Inglishe understand, 

That was bom in Inglond." 3 

1 "Vor bote a man conne Frenss, me telp of him lute 

Ac low men holdeth ::> EngHts and to hor owe speche yute, " 

— Rhyming Chronicle, cir. 1297 

3 The metrical romance of Arthur and Merlin, cir. 1350. 



THE MAKING OF THE LANGUAGE. 101 

Another author, probably a contemporary of Chaucer, 
writes in the same spirit : " Let clerks indite in Latin, and 
let Frenchmen in their French also indite their quaint 
terms, for it is kindly to their mouths ; and let us show our 
fantasies in such words as we learned of our own mother- 
tongue." * But while French was being thus given up, 
there was as yet no one national English established and 
understood throughout the whole of England. One kind of 
English was spoken in the north, another in the middle 
districts, and another in the south, and even these three 
forms were split up into further dialects. These three dia- 
lects are commonly known as the Northern, Midland, and 
Southern English. During the latter part of the fourteenth 
century the East Midland English, or that spoken in and 
about London, which was in the eastern part of the Mid- 
land district, asserted itself above the confusion and grad- 
ually became accepted as the national speech. Midland 
English had an importance as the language of Oxford and 
Cambridge, as well as that of the capital and the court, 
and its supremacy was further due to its being made the 
language of literature. The language of Wyclif's trans- 
lation of the Bible (1380), a variety of this Midland form, 
is plainly the parent of the noble Bible English of our later 
versions. The poet John Gower (1330-1408) gave up the 
use of French and Latin to write in the King's or Court 
English; and, more than all, it was in this same East 
Midland English of the court that Geoffrey Chaucer 
wrote his poems. These works did much towards giving 
to East Midland English a supremacy that it never 
lost. 

But this triumph of English was a partial triumph; for, 
when during the fourteenth century a national language 

1 The Testament of Love, a poem of uncertain authorship formerly 
attributed to Chaucer and supposed to have been written before 
1388 



102 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

began to emerge out of all this confusion of tongues, it 
was not the purely Teutonic speech of the earlier time. 
The French When Chaucer wrote, the language of the East 
element in Midland district was no longer a pure English; 
there, as elsewhere, the local variety of the native 
speech had been modified by a large infusion of French. 
It was a mixed language, still substantially English in its 
foundations of grammar and construction, but a composite, 
so far as its vocabulary was concerned, of the two rival 
tongues. The barriers between the two languages, so long 
kept separate, had been broken down; and between 1300 
and 1350 a vast number of French words passed over into 
English. Our modern English is thus built out of Teu- 
tonic and Romance (that is, French and Latin) elements, 
and these two elements have contributed about equally to 
its vocabulary. Yet, in spite of the strength of these for- 
eign influences, the language of Chaucer and of Tennyson 
is English rather than French. The words brought in 
from the French have proved a most desirable addition to 
the language ; "but, while they add enormously to its dignity 
and its resources, the French words are, after all, annexed 
to the English language, and they are a luxury, not a ne- 
cessity. The little, indispensable words that form the basis 
of the language, the words that we use the oftenest, are 
English and not French. We can make ourselves under- 
stood if we discard the French element and use words of 
English origin only, but we can hardly frame an intelli- 
gible sentence made up entirely of words imported into 
English from the Latin or French. Yet, while this Saxon 
English may suffice for the bare necessities of speech, while 
at times it may even be amply sufficient, the obligations of 
both the English language and literature to the Romance 
element cannot be measured. It is this mingling of 
Romance with Teutonic, this fusion of two languages, that 
has given to modern English many of the peculiar virtues 



THE MAKING OF THE LANGUAGE. 103 

of each and made it the richest and noblest instrument of 
literary expression which men have created for their use 
since classic times. By virtue of this union of opposites, 
English can be rugged, strong, terse, simple, and direct, or 
it can be sonorous, flowing majestic, and melodious. It is 
as though something soft, sweet, and feminine were united 
to something full of rough and masculine vigour; and, as a 
rule, the passages that are the glories of the literature owe 
their distinctive style to a blending of Saxon elements with 
the French, and to a conscious or unconscious appreciation 
of the advantages to be gained from each. The benefit 
that the language has derived from the assimilation of this 
Romance element is but another illustration of the deep and 
various obligations of the English to the Latin genius. It 
helps to impress us afresh with the conviction that there 
was something in the quality of that Latin civilisation of 
the South which the great Teutonic race of the North 
needed to inspire it, to supplement its deficiencies, and to 
carry it forward to its full growth. 

As we look back to the beginnings of the literature, we 
see that not only the Latin element but many others had 
combined in this composite England, and that the way 
was made clear for a great poet who should record the ca- 
pabilities of the plastic language, and whose genius should 
express this union of diverse elements. That poet was 
Geoffrey Chaucer. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 
Ohav:!?'- Gentuby. 

"Forget six counties overhung with smoke, 
Forget the snorting steam, and piston stroke, 
Forget the spreading of the hideous town; 
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, 
And dream of London, small, and white, and rlgam, 
The clear Thames bordered by its gardei 



While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's pen 
Moves over bills of lading/' 

— William Mohbis. 

Prologue to The Earthly Paradise. 

To get near to Chaucer, to read his poetry with entire 
sympathy and delight, one must forget our modem world 
for the time and go back in imagination into that other 
world of the fourteenth century, in the midst of which he 
lived and worked. There was much in that world to fire 
the imagination and to quicken the energies of a great poet. 
It was a brilliant, stirring, and ambitious time, when life was 
full of violent and dramatic contrasts. It was peculiarly a 
time of change. Europe was already restive under the 
leaven of new ideas. Here and there men were beginning 
to grow impatient of the old restraints and conventions, 
and to rebel against long established institutions c: 
cepted modes of thought. The old order indeed ye: re- 
mained; but, as we look back to the fourteenth century 
and interpret it by our knowledge of the centuries that fol- 
lowed, we see plainly signs of a new order, a ne^ 

104 



CHAUCER'S ENGLAND. 105 

living, and a new conception of life. Europe, still mediae- 
val, was on the threshold of the Renaissance. Chaucer's 
world was mediaeval: he grew up under the influences of 
mediae val literature and mediaeval ideas. Yet it was also 
the world of the coming Renaissance, shaken and stimu- 
lated by new ideas. We cannot study the history of this 
time without finding traces of the new spirit growing under 
the old forms, which it will presently break and utterly 
destroy. 

Chivalry, for instance, was a peculiarly mediaeval insti- 
tution, and in the fourteenth century chivalry still flourished 

in even more than its former pomp and splendour. 

In England, the reign of Edward III. was marked 
by a showy magnificence. In that reign the war between 
England and France, known as the Hundred Years' War, 
was begun, and this contest between two powerful and 
chivalric nations was the occasion of a great display of 
knightly deeds. Then, as Froissart wrote, were many " hon- 
ourable and noble adventures of feats of arms, done and 
admired." l It was in this reign that Edward, the Black 
Prince, when a boy of sixteen, won his spurs at Crecy, and 
that the blind king of Bohemia was guided by his own com- 
mand into the thick of the battle " that he might strike one 
stroke with his sword." The heart of the old chronicler 
Froissart kindles as he recites the names of the gallant 
knights who fought for England: "they in all their deeds 
were so valiant that they ought to be reputed as sovereigns 
in all chivalry." "Also in France at that time there were 
found many good knights, strong and well expert in feats 
of arms; for the realm of France was not so discomfited 
but that always there were people sufficient to fight withal." 
In England the outward forms and shows of chivalry were 
yet an accepted part of the nation's life. Edward was 
a patron of the tournament; he had a Round Table at 

1 Froissart's Chronicles, Berner's ed. chap. ii. 



106 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

Windsor, in emulation of that of King Arthur; he instituted 
the famous chivalric Order of the Garter. 

There are many other things in this England of the four- 
teenth century to remind us that Chaucer lived in a me- 
diaeval world. If we have the splendour and 
England! romance of the Middle Ages, we have also the 
dirt and squalor, the crude ignorance and the 
unspeakable coarseness, which were at least equally char- 
acteristic of that time. The land itself is in part sheer 
wilderness. There are great stretches of forest, the haunts 
of the deer, the grey wolf, the boar, and the wild bull ; there 
are marshes, such as the great fens of Lincolnshire and 
Somerset, untenanted as yet save by the birds. It is a 
rough, cruel world; life is none too safe even on the king's 
highway. The townspeople dwell within walls and shut 
the gates at curfew. At Newcastle-on-Tyne, near the 
Scotch border, where marauding bands swoop down, as the 
Douglas did against the Percies, a hundred armed citizens 
keep nightly watch upon the walls. London itself, except 
on the side towards the river, was still a walled town; the 
houses were chiefly of wood and timber; the streets, nar- 
row and unpaved, sloped to a gutter or open sewer in the 
middle, foul with refuse; but the Thames was still clear 
and beautiful, and beyond the city gates lanes led the Lon- 
doners through fair meadows, where the tender spring green 
of the grass was starred by the daisies that Master Chaucer 
loved to greet and honour. A stone bridge, with houses 
built on either side of its narrow roadway, connected Chau- 
cer's London with Southwark on the opposite of the Thames. 
At Southwark there were fields and gardens, and round 
wooden buildings for bear-baiting or cock-fighting; there, 
near the end of the bridge, was the old Tabard Inn, in whose 
square courtyard motley companies of pilgrims were wont 
to gather on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket 
at Canterbury. 



RISE OF THE PEOPLE. 107 

But this strange, picturesque, and narrow world of the 
Middle Ages was already near its end. Already the new 

world was beginning to push it aside. While 
orde? eW Edward was founding a new order of chivalry, 

his Knights of the Garter (1344), a new instru- 
ment of destruction, the cannon, was being introduced into 
warfare which was to revolutionise the art of war. Be- 
fore long this new invention, unimportant at first, was to 
shatter the solid masonry of the feudal castles and make 
the armour of the knight a useless encumbrance. Mean- 
while the supremacy of the knight was threatened by a new 
power, the rising power of the English people. There are 
many signs of this. The battles in the Hundred Years' 
War are memorable not merely for their display of chival- 
ric courage and courtesy, but also for the great part played 
in them by the people of England. The truly significant 
feature of these battles is indeed not the splendid spectacle 
of knightly gallantry; it is rather the effectiveness of the 
English yeomen, the archers whose "grey-goose shafts" did 
so much to turn the day at Crecy and Poitiers. It has 
been said that this national character of the English army, 
this triumph of the foot-soldier over cavalry, was "the 
death-knell of Feudalism." 

The popular spirit, asserting itself in unconscious rivalry 
or in open opposition to the feudal power of king and 

barons, found at the same time a political ex- 
toe people* P ress i° n m the establishment of the Commons as 

a separate branch of the Parliament. Beneath 
all the ostentatious magnificence of the early part of Ed- 
ward's reign, we see the transfer of the real power from the 
king to the people ; and, by a singular irony, Edward parts 
with some of his royal privileges that he may carry on the 
contest with France. The chivalric pride of Edward's army 
was thus sustained by an increase in the rival power of the 
people. Finally, in the "Good Parliament" of 1376, we 



108 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

find the "Commons" united against their feudal superiors, 
the Baronage and the King. 

Many things combined to produce a popular demand 
for liberty and equality that was curiously modern. 

The old manorial system of land tenure was 
Death. aC being abandoned for one which secured greater 

independence to the labourer, but the chief 
causes of this popular uprising were probably the unsettled 
state of labour, the bitter discontent and the growing im- 
portance of the working-classes, which followed the suc- 
cessive visitations of a terrible plague called "The Black 
Death." It is difficult for us who live in a world made 
comparatively clean, comfortable, and decent, to imagine 
the abject misery to which the English people were re- 
duced by this loathsome and often fatal disease. The 
first of this awful series of pestilences reached England 
from Southern Europe in 1348, two years after the bril- 
liant victory of Crecy, and from that time until nearly 
the end of the century the land was desolated by periodi- 
cal recurrences of the disease. The number of deaths 
was very great, for, besides those who died of the plague, 
many more perished miserably from want and hunger. 
Famine followed the pestilence, as some farms had been 
left untilled, some had but scanty crops, and on others, 
for want of labourers, the harvests rotted in the fields. 
The land was filled with vagrants, driven by illness and 
starvation to beggary or theft. The organisation of 
labour was unsettled, and the very foundations of society 
seemed shaken. The people, thus laden with a burden 
that seemed almost too heavy to bear, were called upon 
to pay a heavy tax to defray the cost of the French war. 
The poor were arrayed against the rich; they questioned 
and scoffed at the class distinctions that were so insepa- 
rable a part of the feudal society, and rose in armed re- 
volt. The age of the courtly Froissart is thus also the age 



DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION. 109 

of a peasantry pushed forward by new economic conditions 
to fight against the old order of society. While the 
French chronicler celebrates the glories of Knighthood, 
the English people are singing the crude rhyme : 

"When Adam delved and Eve span, 
Who was then the gentleman? " 

This feeling found a spokesman in the revolutionary 
teachings of John Ball, "the mad Priest of Kent." 

Crowds gathered about Ball in the cloisters of 
democracy. Canterbury Cathedral, and "many of the mean 

people loved him" and affirmed that "he saith 
truth." Inside the great cathedral was the rich shrine 
of St. Thomas a Becket, the goal of many a mediaeval 
pilgrimage, but outside in the cloisters the voice of the 
preacher seems to be the voice of the modern world. 
"What have we deserved, or why should we be kept 
thus in servage? We be all come from one father and 
mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or show 
that they be greater lords than we be, saving by that 
they cause us to win and labour for that they dispend? 
They are clothed in velvet and camlet furred with grise ! l 
and we be vestured with poor cloth; they have their wines, 
spices, and good bread, and we have the drawing out of 
the chaff and drink water: they dwell in fair houses, and 
we have the pain and travail, the rain and wind, in the 
fields; and by that that cometh of our labours they keep 
and maintain their estates." 2 Ball's teachings were social- 
istic: he declared that "everything should be common;" 
and many, while they stopped short of this extreme, 
shared in his democratic feeling and in his demand for 
a social reform. In the Vision of William Langland, 
the poet of the people, the Plowman warns the Knight 

1 Grey: here the grey fur of the squirrel or rabbit. 

2 Froissart's Chronicles, chap, ccclxxxi. 



110 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

that the class distinctions, of which men then thought 
so much, were but temporal things, of but little moment 
beside the eternal difference between the good and the 
evil. " And if thou ill-use not thy bondman thou mayest 
speed the better; though he be here thy underling, in 
heaven it may well hap that he be set higher and in greater 
bliss than thou, except thou do better and live as thou 
shouldest; Amice, ascende superius; 1 for in the charnel 
house at the church it is hard to know churls, or a knight 
from a knave; know this in thine heart." 2 

In religion, too, we notice signs of a coming change. 
Mediaeval Christianity was still supreme; the Church 
. was enormously wealthy and powerful; prelates 

dressed richly and lived in ostentatious lux- 
ury; her services were splendid and impressive. In 
England Westminster Abbey was being enlarged; noble 
cathedrals were being erected; the great builder, William 
of Wykeham, was busy at Winchester. But the forces 
of disruption were already active. The Church no longer 
inspired that * devotion which we find in the days of the 
earlier crusades. In 1309 the Pope removed from Rome 
to Avignon, and the reverence and awe with which he 
had been regarded were greatly lessened when men saw 
him made the political tool of the growing power of France. 
Englishmen resented the Pope's interference in the af- 
fairs of their kingdom; they refused (1366) to pay the 
tribute which England had paid the Pope since the reign 
of King John. The sale of pardons, and the multiplying 
corruptions and abuses in the Church, the sordidness 
and lack of spirituality in many of its clergy, moved 

1 "Friend, go up higher." St. Luke, xiv. 10. 

2 Langland's Vision of Piers the Ploughman, ed. by Kate M. Warren, 
p. 91. C/. Shirley, "A Dirge:" 

"Sceptre and crown 
Must tumble down," etc. 



FOURTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE. Ill 

earnest men to scorn and satire. The Church of the 
Middle Ages, like the feudalism of the Middle Ages, was 
shaken by the modern spirit, and the Reformation was 
at hand. 

The old educational system, the scholastic learning of 
the Middle Ages, was still intrenched at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge. Two Oxford scholars, Duns Scotus (d. 

SSiST 1308 )' and WlLLIAM 0F Occam (d. cir. 1349), are 
among the last of the mediaeval schoolmen. The 
Oxford Clerk in the Canterbury Tales delighted in Aristotle, 
an author of the first importance in the old education of 
the monastic schools. Yet a "new learning" had already 
arisen in Italy; a liberation of the intellect had already 
begun in which Chaucer himself shared. Twenty years be- 
fore Chaucer's birth Dante, the first supremely great poet 
since the classic writers, had died in exile at Ravenna, 
leaving behind him in his Divine Comedy, the supreme 
expression of the world of Mediaeval Christendom. When 
Chaucer was a year old, Petrarch, poet and scholar, and 
the great pioneer in the new way of thinking and feeling, 
was crowned with laurel at Rome. Boccaccio was pointing 
out in the prose tales of his Decamerone, the fresh and 
careless pleasure in love, laughter, and the beauty of 
this world, that was to characterise the Italy of the 
Renaissance. 

Art, too, guided by the same new impulse, was freeing 
itself from mediaeval restrictions. Sculpture was advanc- 
ing in the work of such men as Niccola Pisano and Ghiberti, 
and in painting Giotto (1276-1337) stands at the beginning 
of a new and mighty era in the history of art. In England, 
these social, religious, and intellectual changes, which 
marked the breaking up of the mediaeval and the begin- 
ning of the modern world, found expression in three great 
writers, William Langland, John Wyclif, and Geoffrey 
Chaucer. 



112 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

Literature in the Fourteenth Century. 

Literature in fourteenth-century England shows that di- 
versity in language, that confusion of traditions and ideals, 
which characterised the time. When the century opened, 
London had not yet taken its place as the literary centre of 
the nation; literature was still local, and writers of the 
North, South, or middle West still used the dialect, or form 
of English, peculiar to their section. Before the century 
closed, a comparative order and unity had emerged from 
the confusion; the East-Midland dialect had won the ascen- 
dency, and a truly national literature had been begun. 
The part played by Langland, Wyclif , and Chaucer in this 
memorable transition cannot be understood without some 
knowledge of the provincial or minor literature of the 
time. 

The earlier writers of the century took up and carried 
forward the work of their immediate predecessors without 
any marked break or change. In the latter half 
tt^SSS ^ of ' the tnirteentn century, Northumbria, the old 
home of poetry and culture, had given promise 
of a literary revival; and during the first half of the century 
following, several remarkable works were produced in the 
North. Among them the Cursor Mundi (cir. 1320-5), a 
poem of nearly thirty thousand lines, on the course of 
human history, holds an important place. 1 The author 
of this vast work, nearly three times as long as Paradise 
Lost, is unknown; but it is thought to have been written 
in the diocese of Durham. Like the paraphrases of 

1 Cursor Mundi, so-called because it runs over the history of the 
world. At the beginning of one of the many manuscripts of the poem 
an unknown hand has written: 

"This is the best boke of alle, 
The cours of the werlde men dos hit calle." 

See Ten Brink, Eng. Lit. i. p. 289. 



ROLLE. 113 

Csedmon and his school, the Cursor Mundi is based on 
the Bible; but the author has also drawn from other 
sources, and introduced many mediaeval legends and 
traditions into the original narrative. The occasion for 
poems of this character in the Middle Ages is apparent. 
To make the Bible intelligible to the masses, it was neces- 
sary to render it into the vulgar tongue; and in those 
days, when the people were densely ignorant and slow- 
witted, men sought to make the chief events of Bible 
history vivid and interesting to the populace. The 
Cursor Mundi is thus obviously connected with the miracle 
plays, and especially with the so-called Collective Mystery, 
which presented the course of the sacred narrative in a 
series of dramatic scenes. 

Among this group of Northern writers is the strange fig- 
ure of Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hampole. This man, 
Richard eccentric as he may appear to modern eyes, was 
Rolle, of one of the influential and typical personages of 
Hampole. ^ g ^ me ft om a ^ Thornton in Yorkshire about 
the end of the thirteenth century, he came as a youth to 
study at Oxford, at this time the rival of the University at 
Paris as a school of learning. But the hard logic of the 
Schoolmen failed to satisfy the emotional side of his deeply 
religious nature, and at nineteen Rolle left Oxford and re- 
turned home, resolved to become a hermit and give himself 
up to prayer and contemplation. He made a hermit's 
habit for himself out of two of his sister's kirtles, one white 
and the other grey; and, slipping his father's cloak over 
this improvised costume, he retired to a neighbouring wood. 
Shortly after he preached a sermon which so impressed the 
Squire, Sir John Dalton, that he supplied the youthful her- 
mit with a more appropriate dress and the means of sub- 
sistence. Rolle was a true mystic, a man to whom the 
invisible seemed very real and near, but he did not spend all 
his life in an ecstasy of meditation. He believed in good 



114 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

works also, and wandered through Northern Yorkshire, 
preaching to the people. He made a metrical version of the 
Psalter, and wrote many religious works both in prose and 
verse. He settled finally in Hampole, in Southern York- 
shire, where he died in 1349, the year of the first pestilence. 
Whether we view him as a man or as an author, Rolle amply 
repays our study. He is a mediaeval saint and mystic, yet 
he rebels against the fetters of scholasticism, and he speaks 
to the common people in plain English with the zeal of a 
Protestant reformer. In this abandonment of Latin for 
English he anticipated Wyclif, and in his recognition of the 
importance of good works he resembled Langland. From 
one aspect he represented the spirit of the past, from an- 
other he seems the herald of the future. Rollers work 
marks a forward step in the advance of English prose. 
Earnest and devout, he rises at times to a true eloquence, 
and in some purely narrative passages his style is strong, 
simple, and clear. He bears witness to those abuses of the 
time which a little later called forth the invective of Lang- 
land, and the following passage reads like a prose version of 
Piers the Plowman. Dread, describing the torments of the 
sinful, says that he saw in hell — " Riche men w T ith their 
servants that the poor harmed; Doomsmen that would not 
doom, but it were for mede; — Workmen that falsely 
swynkis (work) and take full hire; — Prelates that have 
care of men's souls, that neither chastise nor teach them.'' 1 
Besides his prose Rolle made a metrical version of the 
Psalter, and composed a long poem, called The Prick of 
Conscience, and a number of religious lyrics. In these 
poems, as in Rolle's other work, rhapsodies of devotion 
alternate with gloomy reflections on the horrors of death 
and corruption, the instability of earthly glories, and the 
pitiful weakness and wretchedness of man's earthly lot- 

1 Richard Rolle of Hampole; Yorkshire Writers, i. 153. Passage 
quoted has been modernised. 



SONG AND ROMANCE. 115 

He has a mediaeval contempt for the body; he broods on 
death and the grave with a morbid intentness: 

"For in is world es nane swa witty, 
Swa fair, swa Strang, ne swa myghty, 
Emperour, kyng, duke, ne caysere, 
Ne other at bers grete state here, 
Ne riche, ne pure, bond ne fre, 
Lered or lawed, 1 what swa he be, 
That he ne sal turne at the last oway, 
Til poudre and erthe and vyle clay; 
And wormes sal ryve hym in sondre. " 2 

Trite as these reflections are, they are noteworthy because 
the mood is so characteristically English. In spite of all 
those alien influences with which England has been satu- 
rated, influences from which Rolle himself was by no means 
exempt, there remains the substratum of English serious- 
ness and English religion. Here in this fourteenth-century 
mystic is the spirit which produced that unknown Anglo- 
Saxon's poetic meditations on the Grave, 3 the spirit that 
speaks in Raleigh's famous apostrophe to Death, the spirit 
that moves Hamlet to a curious interest in the business of 
the gravedigger, and prompts him to say to Yorick's skull, 
" Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her 
paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come." The 
Prick of Conscience (c. 1340), Rolle's most important work, 
is a sombre, distressful poem, addressed to the unlearned, 
"that can ne Latyn understand," and intended, by its 
dreadful picture of death and judgment, to prick the 
reader's conscience, so that he may " work good works and 
flee folly." 

With these religious poets we may mention Lawrence 
Minot, who wrote patriotic lyrics in commemoration of the 

1 Learned or ignorant (lewd). 
8 The Prick of Conscience, 1. 880 f. 

s This poem is given (in translation) in Moi-ley^s English Writers t 
II. 333. 



116 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

foreign victories of Edward III. Next to nothing is known 
of Minot, but he is supposed to have come from the border 
region between the South-Midland district and 
Mjtoot!" 56 ^ ne North. His songs are of no great poetical 
merit, but Minot sings the deeds of his heroes 
with the enthusiasm of an old-time gleeman celebrating 
the triumphs of his chief, and his lyrics at least suggest 
to us the rising spirit of national pride. 

Fourteenth-century England had also a rich inheritance 
in the world of ballad and romance. Marvellous tales of 
magic and knightly adventure, which the Eng- 
lish had appropriated from Wales and Ireland, 
from Normandy and Brittany, had become a popular 
possession. Wandering minstrels still rehearsed the old 
stories of romance. Jugglers still made mirth in the 
castle-hall, and in the farm or village ballads were made 
or sung. Men still believed in marvels ; they were capable 
of fear, wonder, and awe in the presence of the unseen; 
and the land was "fulfilled of fayerye." In the middle 
years of the' century, probably about 1370, when Chaucer 
in London was just entering upon his poetical career, a 
poet in the Welsh Marches wrote one of the most beautiful 
of English romances, Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight. 
Of this poet absolutely nothing is known; some are in- 
clined to think that he lived in Cheshire. In any case, 
the dialect in which his poem is written indicates that its 
nameless author came from somewhere in that border 
region, the country of Geoffrey of Monmouth and of Laya- 
mon, which was a meeting-place for the genius of the Eng- 
lish and the Celt. The story of Sir Gawayne need not be 
told here, for no summary could do justice to its peculiar 
and fantastic charm. It is enough to say that the hero, 
the brave and noble Knight of earlier legend, not the 
light-minded and dissolute Gawayne of Tennyson's 
Idylls, sets forth alone upon a dangerous enterprise: 



GAWAYNE AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. 117 

that he is sorely tempted, and that, though he does not 
come through scathless, he yet succeeds in preserving 
his knightly honour essentially pure and unstained. A 
moral purpose runs through the story. Gawayne, seek- 
ing to save his own life, stoops to deceit, and is wounded 
because of his lack of perfect openness and loyalty. He 
owns his fault with a frank humility, declaring that he 
will henceforth wear the green girdle (which he had 
trusted would protect him by its magical virtue), not as 
a charm, nor for its jewels and samite, but as a sign of his 
transgression, that he may remember his weakness in 
prosperity, when he "rides in renown." There are traces 
in Sir Gawayne of French and perhaps of Celtic sources, 
but its freshness and originality are far more important 
than its relation to the past. This unknown poet was 
no servile imitator of foreign models ; he could appropriate 
foreign material, and use it in his own way. There is, 
moreover, a blending of native and foreign elements 
which is highly significant. It suggests the close of the 
long period of apprenticeship to French masters; it sug- 
gests that the native English genius, having " spoiled the 
Egyptians," is about to pass out of the land of bondage. 
In Sir Gawayne the old fashion of alliteration is revived, 
although the old metrical form is not preserved. More- 
over, the author evidently saw Nature for himself; and 
instead of the conventional landscape of the French ro- 
mances, with its soft grass, its buds and flowers, we find 
the cliffs and forests of the Welsh mountains. Instead 
of the traditional May morning, we meet with pictures 
of the bleaker and rougher aspects of nature that recall 
the sterner note of the Anglo-Saxon. Gawayne journeys 
in winter through a harsh and forbidding wilderness. 
He scales cliffs, he fords streams, he sleeps in his iron 
harness on the naked rocks. At last he approaches his 
destination: 



118 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

"At morn by a mountain he merrily rideth, 
Through a forest full deep that was wondrous and wild, 
High hills on each hand, with a wood stretching under 
All full of hoar oaks, a hundred together; 
The hazel and hawthorne, entwined in a tangle, 
The rough, ragged moss on every side streaming, 
And birds sitting sadly perched on the bare branches, 
Most piteously piped for pain of the cold. 1 

There is also an appreciation of the various aspects of 
Nature remarkable in that early time. Three hundred 
years before Thomson published the Seasons, the poet 
of Sir Gawayne packed into thirty lines the germ of Thom- 
son's poem. The changes wrought by the successive 
seasons are brought before us by a few suggestive details. 
We follow the course of the "revolving year " until 

— "All ripens and rots that bloomed at first, 
And thus runneth the year into yesterdays many, 
And winter winds round again as the world asketh." 

With the romance of Sir Gawayne we may associate 
three other poems, Cleanness, Patience, and The Pearl. 
Cleanness, These have been handed down to us in the 
Patience, and same manuscript as Sir Gawayne, and are writ- 
ten in the same dialect. This has led many to 
conjectine that all four poems are the work of the same 
nameless author. Both Cleanness and Patience have a 
distinctly moral purpose, being intended, as their titles 
imply, to enjoin the duty of purity and of submission to 
the Divine will. The beautiful elegy of The Pearl, 2 " our 
earliest In Memoriam," teaches the same lesson of resig- 

1 Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, 1. 740. In modernising the 
above passage an attempt has been made to preserve as far as possible 
the spirit of the original at the expense of a literal accuracy. 

2 It is proper to say that Professor Schofield of Harvard dissents 
from the usual interpretation of The Pearl. He contends that it is 
not an elegy, the expression of grief for a personal loss, not the lament 
of a father for the loss of his child, but a theological disquisition. See 
his interesting paper in the publications of the Modern Language Asso- 
ciation. 



THE PEARL. 119 

nation. A father, overcome with grief at the death of 
his little daughter, is taught to rise above the merely 
earthly view of his loss, and to accept it with faith and 
patience. The poet in the true mediaeval spirit has 
treated this theme in the form of an allegory. He tells 
us that he has lost a precious jewel in his arbour, a spot- 
less pearl, that has slipped from the grass into the ground. 
To this arbour he comes mourning on a day in August, 
when the corn is cut with the sickle, and falls asleep above 
the grassy spot where his lost pearl lies. Then, while 
his body sleeps, his soul leaves the earth and comes, by 
God's grace, to a far country, very strange and beauti- 
ful. He sees hills crowned with shining cliffs of clear 
crystal, with a wonderful forest near by, in which the 
tree-trunks are azure and the leaves are gleaming silver. 
Surrounded by such beauty he forgets his grief. He 
follows a path through the woods until he comes to a broad 
river, whose banks gleam as the beryl stone. Jewels 
gleam from its dark depths, as stars glimmer in the sky 
on a winter night when weary men sleep. He longs to 
cross this stream, but cannot. At length, filled with 
longing, he sees a little maid, clad in glistening white 
and more radiant than gold, standing in the sunshine on 
the farther shore, and she is adorned with pearls. She 
comes nearer, and he speaks to hen 

"'0 Perle/ quoth I, 'in perles pyght, 
Art thou my perle that I haf playned 
Regretted by myn one, an nyghte? 
Much longeyng haf I for the layned, 
Sythen into gresse thou me aglyte; — 



What wyrde has hyder my juel wayned 
And don me in del and gret daunger? 
Fro we in twynne wern towen and twayned 
I haf been a joyles jueler. ' " 

Then the child rebukes and comforts him. She tells 
him that his pearl is not lost, but safe; that the treasure 



120 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

he lost was no jewel, but a rose that like all roses had to 
bloom and fade, and that now this rose had become a 
pearl of great price. The father is finally granted a sight 
of the Heavenly City, and he sees his child among the 
glad and shining train, his pearl that he had loved and 
lost. 

So far in this survey of this period, we have seen during 
the early half of the century, the signs of literary activity 
in the North, followed by a remarkable development of 
alliterative poetry in the West-Midland district. But 
London during the latter hah of the century, London, 
becomes lit- the birthplace and residence of Chaucer, the 
erary centre, g^^est poet that England had yet produced, 
became for the first time the literary centre of the 
country. Up to this time London, notwithstanding its 
size and political position, had been of no literary impor- 
tance. The educational, intellectual, and literary activi- 
ties of the nation had centred now at Canterbury, or 
Jarrow, now at York, or Winchester, at Oxford or 
the Welsh border. But with the advent of Chaucer 
and his fellow-poet the learned John Gower (1330- 
1408), the geographical centre of England shifted once and 
forever, and London became the literary capital of the 
whole people. From that time to this, from Chaucer to 
Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to Pope and Johnson, 
from Johnson to Carlyle, the scene of England's literary 
history is laid in the streets and theatres, the taverns, 
clubs, and coffee-houses of the city of London. 

The effect on language of this ascendency of London 
and the East-Midland district has been already noticed; 
its effect on poetry was of a similar character. The East- 
Midland dialect, the language of Chaucer, obtained pre- 
cedence over the various local forms of speech; while 
Chaucer's manner and verse-forms were copied by his 
poetical successors. English poetry followed in the 



WYCLIF. 121 

wake of the great Londoner, and the revival of the allite- 
rative verse along the Welsh border was but a local and 
temporary outbreak of a form which was soon to pass 
away. One other great alliterative poem which we must 
consider separately, Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman, 
was indeed written presumably by a native of the West 
Midlands, but with it the native verse-form practically 
passes out of the literature. 

The period which is marked by the rise of London to 
literary importance is also memorable in the history of 
The rise of English prose. The work of Alfred in behalf of a 
English native prose-literature had been so effectually 
prose. undone by foreign ecclesiastics that, from the 

middle of the twelfth to the latter part of the four- 
teenth century, only a few specimens of vernacular prose 
emerge from the great stream of Latin. English prose 
was much slower than English poetry in regaining its 
freedom; but early in the reign of Richard II. (1377- 
1399) it begins to reassert itself, and before the end of the 
century it has made a decided advance. This advance 
was not due to any one writer, it was rather a manifes- 
tation of national conditions, social, political, and religious. 
It is connected, of course, with the ever increasing impor- 
tance of the English language, and it is nearly related to 
that rise of the people which is one of the great historic 
features of the time. Underneath the violence and 
clamour of the popular uprisings, men felt, if vaguely, the 
appearance of a new social force. The people were thus 
to be reckoned with, to be appealed to, argued with, 
persuaded; and to reach the people, the scholar must 
abandon Latin and the scholastic phrase, and address 
them in simple English prose. 

This was the course adopted by John Wyclif (cir. 
1324-1384), "the last of the Schoolmen, the first of the 
Protestant reformers/ 7 and the most famous English 



122 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

scholar of his time. Like Rolle, Wyclif had come to 
Oxford from his native Yorkshire. But Wyclif was 
made of sterner stuff than his emotional prede- 
cessor. A man of strong and subtle intellect, 
he mastered the scholastic philosophy. At a com- 
paratively early age he was made Master of Balliol 
College, and he soon became prominent as a daring 
thinker and a skilful controversialist. At first, like the 
Schoolmen before him, he wrote in Latin; but if his lan- 
guage and manner were mediaeval, his spirit was modern. 
The new note of independence, the disposition to ex- 
amine into the basis of authority, soimds in his works. 
He counselled England to refuse to pay the tribute de- 
manded by the Pope. He opposed the interference of 
the Church in matters of state, for the temporal as well 
as the spiritual power was derived from God. As the 
controversy progressed, Wyclif s position became more 
radical and revolutionary. His sympathies were with 
the poor; the vast wealth of the Church aroused his hos- 
tility; he did not spare even the Pope himself, but declared 
that as the Vicar of Christ he should be poor and meek as 
his Master was, and the servant of all. 1 Over against 
the authority of the Church and the priesthood, he set the 
authority of the Bible, the right of every man to read it 
for himself, and the direct relation of every man to God. 
Such a position forced Wyclif to turn to the people, and 
to reach the people the great scholar must abandon Latin 
and speak to them in a language all could understand. If 
the Bible was to be a guide for the individual conscience, 
it must be made the book of the people. About 1378, 
therefore, Wyclif, with the aid of Nicholas Herford and 

1 Sermon, xvi. Select Eng. Works of Wyclif, i. 40. Arnold's ed. 
See also Wyclifs famous reply to the Pope's summons (1384), in 
Arnold's ed. supra, ii. 504— 6, or Translations and Reprints, ii. 5, Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania. 



OTHER PROSE WRITERS. 123 

John Purvey, began to translate the entire Bible into 
English (completed 1383). Wyclif also sent out his 
followers, his "poor priests" as they were called, to spread 
his doctrines; while he himself spoke to the people in 
innumerable sermons and tracts, teaching them in plain 
and homely phrase. Memorable as these tracts and ser- 
mons are, the position of Wyclif s Bible in the history of 
English prose is probably even more important. 

It is safe to say that the English translation of the Bible 
is the greatest monument of our prose literature. Its in- 
fluence on prose literature has been incalculable. Many 
of the greatest masters of English prose have drawn from 
it as from a great storehouse, so that biblical illustrations 
and biblical phrases have been wrought into the very fab- 
ric of the literature. The style of our English Bible has a 
dignity, simplicity, and force that have seldom been ap- 
proached and never excelled. Now the basis of the Eng- 
lish Bible was Wyclif s translation. Later translators cor- 
rected, modernised, and improved upon his version; but 
Wyclif was not merely the pioneer, his work was the model 
for all that came after. 

Wyclif is called "the Father of English Prose," but in 
reality this later English prose was growing up through 
the labours of a group of writers of which Wyclif was one. 
Chaucer belongs to this group, although his 
writers* 086 superiority as a poet makes his prose compara- 
tively unimportant. It should be remembered, 
however, that of his Canterbury Tales "The Parson's 
Sermon" and "The Tale of Melibeus" are in prose, and 
that he made English prose versions of Boethius' 
Consolations of Philosophy (cir. 1382) and a treatise 
on the Astrolabe (1391). Another of these latter four- 
teenth-century prose-writers was John of Trevisa, vicar 
of Berkley in Gloucester, who translated a number of 
works from Latin into English. His best known work 



124 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

(1387) is an English rendering of the Polychronicon of Ran- 
ulph (or Ralph) Higden, a formidable survey of general his- 
tory. Still more notable is The Voyages and Travels of Sir 
John Mandeville, the English version of which dates from 
about this time or a little later. This entertaining book 
purporting to be an account of a journey to the Holy Land, 
was intended (so the author tells us) as a guide for those 
who " will visit the Holy City of Hierusalem, and the places 
that are thereabout." But in reality it is not, like the 
Travels of Marco Polo, the record of an actual journey, but 
a medley, partly compiled from popular legends and travel- 
lers ' stories, and partly pure invention. The book is 
thought to have been written originally in French by a 
physician named Jean de Bourgogne; Sir John Mandeville 
"was as purely a fictitious person as Gulliver or Robinson 
Crusoe." The maker of the English version is not known. 
But this book of marvels, recounted in a rather matter-of- 
fact fashion, as though noted by the quick eye of an observ- 
ant traveller, did much to enlarge the borders of English 
prose, and take it beyond the narrow limits of history and 
theology. We travel into a far country, a land of the 
imagination, where all things are possible : we read of dia- 
monds which grow when wet in May-dew; of men who have 
but one foot, that one of such a size that they lie on their 
backs and hold it up as a shelter from the rain and heat ; of 
men with heads like hounds, and of men who have no heads 
at all, with eyes in their shoulders; of griffins, and of giants. 
Mandeville 's Travels was a book for the people: we are 
told in the preface that it was translated " out of French 
into English that every man of my nation may understand 
it." Whoever the translator may have been, he helped to 
prepare the way for later English prose. 

So far in our general survey of the literature of the four- 
teenth century, we have considered some of its local mani- 
festations, and have noted the beginning of a more national 



LANGLAND. 125 

poetry in London, and the renewal of English prose. We 
must now consider two of the representative poets of the 
period at somewhat greater length. 



WILLIAM LANGLAND. 

(Cir. 1332-cir. 1400.) 

"Langley, that with but a touch 
Of art hadst sung Piers Plowman to the top 
Of English songs, whereof 'tis dearest, now, 
And most adorable." 

— Sidney Lanier: The Crystal. 

"And on the vision he lay musing long, 
And o'er his soul rude minstrel-echoes throng, 
Old measures half-disused ; and grasp'd his pen, 
And drew his cottage-Christ tor homely men." 
— Francis T. Palgrave: The Pilgrim and the Ploughman. 

" The vehement and passionate England that produced the great 
rising of 1381, and the heresy of Wyclif, that later on will give birth to 
the Cavaliers and Puritans, is contained in essence in Langland's work; 
we divine, we foresee her." — J. J. Jusserand. 

Of the outward circumstances of Langland's life almost 
nothing is now known. Chaucer, his great contemporary, 
was a protege of the court; he had a powerful patron, he 
held public office, and had a share in great events; and at 
least the outlines of Chaucer's life can be gathered from a 
careful study of the public records of his time. But Lang- 
land, the poet, as he has been called, of " The Divine Comedy 
of the poor," lived and died apart from these things, an 
obscure, solitary man, not rich certainly, nor looked upon 
with favour by the wealthy or the noble. He would have 
been clean forgotten long ago if he had not put his truest 
self, his answer to the puzzle of human life, into his poem. 
That is his memorial; and, while our knowledge of how and 
when he lived is vague and fragmentary, he reveals himself 
in his work so that, knowing only this, we know what man- 
ner of man he was. 



126 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

His story — so far as it is known or conjectured — is 
soon told. He is supposed to have been born about 1332, 
at Cleobury-Mortimer, in Southern Shropshire. He cer- 
tainly came from somewhere in that region of the Welsh 
border which had already given more than one name to 
literature, for he wrote in a western form of English, and he 
was evidently familiar with the beautiful scenery of the 
neighbouring Malvern Kills. It is among these hills that he 
falls asleep by a brookside, as he tells us in the beginning 
of his poem, and over these hills he wanders brooding over 
his dream. 1 Whatever his situation in life may have been, 
he did not grow up without education, probably gained at 
some monastic school. 

" When i yong was, quod I, manny zer hennes, 
My fader and my frendes founden me to scole 
Til i wiste withturli what holy writ bi-menede 
And what is best for the bodi as the bok tellethe. " 2 

Yet this schooling seems to have left him with a great 

longing for a wider knowledge. 

"Alle the sciences under sonne and all the sotyle craftes ; 
I wolde I knewe, and couth kyndely in myne herte. " s 

But he had a gift that no schools or universities can give, 
and he had a learning that was not to be found in the wisest 
books of his day. He had that rare gift of vision, by 
which he could see the men and women about him as they 
were ; and he had, what is still rarer, the gift of a great pity 
for the sins and miseries of the world. Like most really 
great writers, he looked at the world for himself and not 
through the medium of books; and he knew how the poor 
lived, what they ate, how they dressed, and how they 
talked, — he identified himself with them as even Chaucer, 

1 The Vision of Piers Plowman, Prologue, 1. 1 ff. and Pass, viii 
1. 130. 

2 Vision, text C, Pass. vi. 1. 35. 

3 Vision, text B, Pass. xv. 1. 48, quoted by Jusserand, Literary 
History of the English People, i. 377. 



LANGLAND. 127 

who lived among the great, could not do. Langland en- 
tered into the full stream of life by this poet's insight; he 
knew, as few could have done, the suffering, rebellious Eng- 
land of his day, in which the old forms were rent and shaken 
in a painful struggle with the new thought. And yet all 
the while he seems to have been in the world and yet not of 
it, to have looked on as an outsider at the strange medley 
of human existence; observing it with a singular impar- 
tiality, as one who viewed it from a height. 

Apparently Langland lacked either the art or the wish 
to push his own fortunes, and his lot was a humble if not 
a wretched one. He became what was known as a clerk 
(clericus), that is, he was included among the clergy, but 
only in a minor capacity and not as a priest. He settled 
in London, we do not know how or when, and acted as 
chorister in the chantries (or memorial chapels), singing 
dirges and placebos in the masses held for the repose of 
the dead. There is a kind of pitiful irony in the fact 
that Langland, who believed that the divine forgiveness 
could not be bought for money, and that men were saved 
by their good deeds, should have been compelled to make 
his living by such a means. Yet this, if w T e are to take 
Langland's words literally, was all that he could do, 
since he had not the strength to labour with his hands, 
and he was forced to live by that labour " he had learned 
best." In his poem he alludes to his wife Kit, or Cath- 
erine, and tells us that he lived in a cottage near Cornhill, 
clothed like a "loller," or, as we should say, a vaga- 
bond, or "tramp." He has no fellowship with the rich, 
the prosperous, and the thoughtless, but thrusts his way 
through the gaily dressed crowds of the street, a silent, 
self-contained, poverty-stricken man, filled doubtless with 
his own melancholy and bitter thoughts. He is not one 
to court favour, or to fawn on the great; he scorns to 
salute those with gold collars, or to say "God save you" 



128 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

to the proud nobles. The crowd looked at him in won- 
der, as it has looked at many another prophet who has 
sought to make the world better, and called him a fool and 
a madman. In some such fashion, surely, Dante, who 
had seen a yet more fearful vision, passed among the 
women and children at Ravenna, gaunt and terrible in 
that solitude which is so often the price exacted from 
the great. 

But underneath this show of calm or indifference, 
Langland's heart was hot within him. The sight of 
that world which Chaucer accepted with such easy good- 
humour aroused in Langland a passion of pity, indigna- 
tion, and bitter scorn. He found in his poem a constant 
refuge from loneliness, misunderstanding, and neglect; 
and so in him as in that other prophet of old, the fire 
kindled, and he spake with his tongue. 

For thirty years or more Langland laboured at his 
poem, struggling to give a fit expression to his thought. 
He is supposed to have completed his first 
Vision" 1 S version of it in 1362, when he was still a 
comparatively young man; but apparently it 
was always in his mind, and from time to time he re-wrote 
and enlarged it. With all his effort he could not make it 
a finished or coherent work of art. It remains rough-hewn, 
confused and fragmentary; the style is rambling, often 
crude and unmusical, and hard to follow. But the more 
we read it, the more clearly we see its great redeeming 
qualities. The man who wrote it was not so much an 
artist as a prophet; he was no idle singer in ladies' bowers; 
he had eaten his bread in sorrow, and he spoke with a 
bitter earnestness and sincerity out of the perplexity and 
trouble of his spirit. 

In the opening of the Vision, the poet lies down by a 
brookside, among the Malvern Hills. He has gone far 
and wide through the world, and he is "weary of wan- 



LANGLAND. 129 

dering," so, as he listens to the cheerful murmur of the 
water, he falls asleep and dreams a dream. He finds him- 
self in a strange wilderness. On the top of a hill to the 
eastward rises a great tower, — the Tower of Truth; opposite 
is a deep valley in which is a dungeon, the abode of the 
Father of Falsehood. Between Tower and Dungeon 
there stretches a vast plain, crowded with people, the 
scene of the great human drama, acted out between Truth 
and Falsehood, between Right and Wrong. Repre- 
sentative figures from the England of Langland's time 
are gathered on this plain. There are plowmen who 
play full seldom, and gluttons who waste the fruit of 
the plowman's toil. Ascetics, who renounce the pleas- 
ures of this life for the hope of another, and pleasure- 
lovers who dress themselves gaily, and minstrels who make 
mirth for gold. There are friars who preach for their 
own profit, a Pardoner selling indulgences, sergeants-at- 
law who will not open their mouths without money; there 
are workmen of many trades ; and there are " cakes and 
ale" too, for in the hostelries the cooks are crying out, 
"Come and dine," and the "taverners" praising their 
wines. "Holy Church" tells the dreamer the meaning 
of his vision. She tells him that truth is the best of all 
treasures, and that the way to heaven is through love. 

But what is truth? After various episodes, in which 
Langland satirises the abuses of the time, and personi- 
fies in the richly dressed Lady Meed that spirit of worldly 
rewards which seduces men everywhere by her tempting 
gifts, the search for truth becomes the chief theme. Con- 
science preaches to the people, assembled in the "fair 
field" of this world, and bids pilgrims to seek not the 
"saints at Rome" but "St. Truth, for he may saven you 
all. " * So the world makes a pilgrimage to seek Truth, 
and finds a guide in Piers, a plowman at work in the 
1 Vision, Pass. vs. v. Skeat's ed. 



130 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

fields. He tells them the way to Truth in an allegory, 
which is a striking anticipation of Christian's journey in 
Pilgrim's Progress, but declares that he himself must stay 
and finish ploughing his hah acre. Finally he is persuaded 
to lead them. By Truth Langland appears to have meant 
a heavenly wisdom which should teach men how to live 
rightly, and it becomes plain as the poem proceeds that 
the way to truth is through humility, unfeigned goodness, 
and honest labour. Work is the poet's great remedy for 
the social disorders that were about him. He denounces 
the wasters and the beggars: he scorns those who, while 
Piers toils at his half acre, help him by singing "Hey! 
trolly-lolly!" over their ale. High or low, all should work 
according to their vocation: if they shirk, Hunger must 
compel them. Meanwhile Truth, having heard of the 
pilgrimage, bids Piers to stay at home and till the earth; 
she also sends a pardon to him and his helpers, and to 
those who cannot work through age or illness, and who 
bear their sufferings meekly. This pardon, which the 
priest thinks no pardon at all, is nothing more than this: 
"Do well, and have well, and God shall have thy soul; 
and do evil, and have evil, and hope thou no other but 
that after thy death-day the devil shall have thy soul." 
Without questioning openly the Pope's pardons or the 
efficacy of prayer and penance, the poet solemnly warns 
them that are rich in this world that at the Day of Doom, 
though they come with a bag full of pardons and have 
indulgences double-fold, yet unless their good deeds shall 
help them he would not give for all their pardons "a 
magpie's tail." 

Langland has no novel remedy for the world's healing. 
He bases his poem on scriptural texts; he is under the 
guidance of the Church. Truth reveals to the pilgrim 
only the old doctrine that to fear God and keep his com- 
mandments is the whole duty of man. But, if the teach- 



LANGLAND. 131 

ings of the poem are neither new nor revolutionary, they 
were at least sound and wholesome. Visionary as he was, 
The poet ^ e was a ^ so a c ^ ose an d accurate observer, and a 
and his practical reformer. Spenser in his Faerie Queene 
transports us into dreamland; but Langland 
shows us under the guise of a dream his England of the 
fourteenth century, peopled by real persons sometimes as 
vividly described as the characters of Chaucer himself. 
And he sees this world fairly. He does not cry out, like 
John Ball, that all things must be in common, nor lay all 
the blame upon the upper classes. He scorns indeed the 
follies and extravagance of the rich, but he rebukes with 
equal severity the idleness and improvidence of the poor. 
His shortcomings, as a poet, lie on the surface. Plainly 
he lacked Chaucer's skill in the poet's craft, the ability 
to tell a story well, the ease, and grace, and charm. But, 
lacking them, he had a far greater intensity, and a rugged, 
uncouth, but unmistakable power. Langland, indeed, 
was English, and the English earnestness, the English 
sincerity, the English conscience, speak through him. 
He preaches, too, with the true English awkwardness and 
bluntness; his verse is the old alliterative measure of his 
race; his style untouched by any of the refinements of 
French or foreign art. To those who think that the 
manner is the only important part of poetry, Langland 
may hardly seem to have been a poet at all; but in any 
case, he had in large measure those qualities which have 
done so much to make England and her literature great. 
For the force back of the native genius of the English is 
not so much artistic as religious and moral. It excels, not 
because it has a turn for fine phrases, a trick of style, a 
delight in beauty for beauty's sake, but because it faces 
life steadily and seriously, and tries honestly to know what 
it is and what it means. There are a few elegant triflers 
among the ranks of England's writers of genius; but, as a 



132 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

rule, the greatest — Spenser, Milton, Bunyan, Words- 
worth, Tennyson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning — are 
teachers, earnest men, bent upon teaching some gospel. 
Shakespeare himself, although his message may seem less 
definite, is, beneath all his wit and laughter, tragically 
serious and profoundly moral. Whatever Langland's defi- 
ciencies as an artist, however rude, abrupt, and disjointed 
his verse, he is yet one with this immortal company by 
virtue of his moral earnestness, his passion for righteous- 
ness, his intensity of purpose. 

There is force in him; unpolished as his lines are, the 
strength of his character dominates us; here is a man who 
thinks and makes us think, who feels and makes us feel, 
who sees and makes us see; and we listen to him, as the 
world did to Piers, the plowman in the field. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 

(Cir. 1340-1400.) 

"The pupil of manifold experience, — scholar, courtier, soldier, 
ambassador, — who had known poverty as a housemate, and been the 
ccmpanion of princes, he was one of those happy temperaments that 
cculd equally enjoy both halves of culture, — the world of books and 
the world of men." — Lowell: Essay on Chaucer. 

"His, to paint 
With Nature's freshness what before him lies: 
The knave, the fool: the frolicsome, the quaint: 
His the broad jest, the laugh without restraint, 
The ready tears, the spirit lightly moved; 
Loving the world and by the world beloved. " 

F. T. Palgrave: Visions of England. 

Chaucer is the first-born of the greater poets of Eng- 
land; the predecessor of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, 
and the rest of the royal line of the English rulers of song. 
He was not indeed as some of his earlier disciples igno- 
rantly thought him, "the Father of English Poetry," for 



CHAUCER. 133 

England, as we have seen, had produced a long succession 
of poets before his time; but he was the first great poet 
who wrote in an English which presents but little diffi- 
culty to the modern reader; he was "the finder of our 
fair language." Chaucer marks the point of departure 
from old precedents and traditions. If he is not "the 
Father of English Poetry," he is the founder of a new 
dynasty, the first great exemplar in England of a poetry 
that in form and spirit was, in a large measure, neither 
Anglo-Saxon nor Celtic, but foreign. This departure on 
Chaucer's part from the older poetry was not a deliberate 
rejection of it, but a natural result of the poet's educa- 
tion and of all the varied experiences which combined to 
mould his genius and direct its course. It is true that 
poets are born, not, made, but the work of even the great- 
est poets is to some degree coloured and shaped by the 
influences which surround them. To understand the 
direction taken by Chaucer's genius, we must therefore 
know something of his life. 

Chaucer was both a poet and a practical and sagacious 
iL&n of affairs, both a student and a courtier, a dreamer 

' iif an< ^ a man °^ ^ e wor ^- Scholars have learned 
'something of the outward and public events 
of his fife from various contemporary records; the story 
of his inner life, and of the development of his genius, 
must be largely a matter of inference or conjecture. In 
studying his life we must endeavour to view it from this 
double aspect; to remember that he was the "pupil of 
manifold experience," and that, while he lived and learned 
in the world of courts and camps, he withdrew at other 
times into that other world of thought and imagination. 
Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London in or about 1340. 
His father, John Chaucer, a prosperous wine-merchant 
on Thames Street, was purveyor to Edward III. and had 
attended the King and Queen in an expedition to Flanders 



134 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

and Cologne (1338). The name Chaucer (which some 
derive from the French chaussier, shoe, or stocking, maker, 
and others from chauffecire, one who makes wax seals 
for legal documents) suggests that the poet was sprung 
from Norman stock. These few facts are significant. 
The poet, who was to leave behind him such lively and 
brightly coloured pictures of mediaeval life, dress, and man- 
ners, was born in the nation's capital, the focus of Eng- 
land's political, social, and commercial life. The narrow, 
crooked streets of the old town were a wonderful school 
for the painter of contemporary life, but the dweller in 
the London of the Plantagenets was not wholly cut off 
from the influence of very different surroundings. Chaucer 
was to be the lover of nature as well as the poet of man; 
in mediaeval London, the sky was not yet obscured by 
soot and smoke, and the open fields and the hedge-rows 
were not very far away. Poet of nature and of man, 
Chaucer was also to be the poet of the upper classes and 
the court, and the conditions of his life led him naturally 
to this likewise. Norman, we may presume, by descent, 
and sprung from a well-to-do family of the merchant 
class, his father's relation to the King must have made 
the court less remote than it would ordinarily have been 
to a child of Chaucer's comparatively humble station. 
Into this life of the court which his father may often 
have described to him, Chaucer himself was destined to 
enter, for, when he was about seventeen, he was made 
page to Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, the daughter-in- 
Pageto ^ w °f Edward III. This early introduction 
Countess of to the court atmosphere is a crucial point 
Ulster c. 1357. in Chaucer's career. While the native Eng- 
lish spirit was beginning to assert itself throughout the 
country, the tone of the court at this time was still foreign. 
French literature was in fashion: "French poets and 
'menestrels' were in the service and pay of the English 



CHAUCER. 135 

King." 1 Queen Philippa and her ladies amused them- 
selves with French poetry and romance. It was a brilliant, 
comfortable world too, adorned with a splendid ceremo- 
nial, stirred by the echo of chivalric deeds, for the King 
had just won the battle of Poictiers (1356). At an age 
when life is very new and wonderful to an eager and 
susceptible youth, the boy-poet Chaucer was transported 
to the midst of this foreign atmosphere, this little world 
of fair ladies and great lords, of French singers and French 
tastes. Outside in the country was the greater world 
of England, a plague-stricken and miserable land where 
the people toiled and hungered, enduring " wind and rain 
in the fields." But circumstances had shut the young 
Chaucer away from this world of the poor; his training 
was that of a gentleman's son; his world, the world of 
chivalry, of romance, and of the court. 

Besides this courtly training and worldly experience, 
Chaucer gained in some way a knowledge of books. He 
learned Latin, and he was probably familiar 
stStent*.* 116 w ^ n French from his earliest years. Like 
Shakespeare he was a lover not only of men but 
of books; and, possessing the industry and enthusiasm of 
the student, he was doubtless his own best teacher. His 
poems are almost always founded upon books; many 
of them are translations or paraphrases of other men's 
work, and he is fond of introducing reminiscences of his 
reading. More than one passage reveals his delight in 
study, and shows us that in the midst of a busy life he 
turned to books for rest and refreshment. Sad and 
wakeful he turns to a book — 

"To rede, and drive the night away;" 

preferring his romance to a game " at chesse or tables. " 3 

1 Ten Brink: English Literature, ii. 38. Robinson's trans. 
* The Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse. 



136 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

He describes the poor student's love of his library with 
a sympathy that is suggestive of a kindred taste. 

"For him was levere have at his beddes heede 
Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reede, 
Of Aristotle and his philosophie, 
Then robes riche, or fithele, or gay sawtrie. " ■ 

He tells us that when he was busy in the London Cus- 
tom House, after he had finished his day's work, instead 
of seeking rest and diversion, he would go home and sit 
over another book than an account book as "dombe as 
any stoon. " 2 The character and scope of Chaucer's 
reading were such as his training and opportunities would 
lead us to expect. He was a child of foreign influences. 
Trained in a court where the King could hardly speak an 
intelligible English sentence, where the names and the 
language of Caedmon and Cynewulf were unknown, Chau- 
cer's literary inheritance was not English but Latin and 
French. He studied the Latin literature of the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries, — Monmouth's Historm Brito- 
num, or the caustic verse of "Walter Map; he knew Vergil's 
JEneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and he had some 
acquaintance with other classical works. But his mother- 
literature was the French. He read the Eomaunt de la 
Rose, the lengthy allegory of the French trouveres Guil- 
laume de Lorris and Jean de Meung; he was influenced by 
the lyrics of his French contemporaries, Guillaume de 
Machault (1284?-1370?) and Eustache Deschamps (1320- 
c. 1400). These men were Chaucer's masters; and, when 
he began to write, addressing, as he did, a courtly audi- 
ence whose literary sympathies were French, he naturally 
followed the French manner. 

But reading and poetry formed but a part of Chaucer's 
eventful and many-sided career. Before he was twenty 

1 "Prologue" to Canterbury Tales. 
1 TJie House of Fame. 



CHAUCER. 137 

he saw something not only of the court but of the camp 
and of the field, for he was with the English army in the 

French campaign of 1359, probably as a mem- 
S^issT* ber of Prince Lionel's suite. While this 

campaign was marked by no brilliant military 
exploits, there must have been much to stir the imagi- 
nation. In those days war was magnificent with that 
"pomp and panoply" in which poets delight, and Chaucer 
saw such spectacles as poets dream of with his bodily eyes. 
As the King's host moved through France, says Froissart, 
it seemed to cover the country, and the soldiers "were 
so richly armed and apparelled that it was a wonder and 
great pleasure to look at the shining arms, the floating 
banners." 1 And in this mighty army were the King, 
the Black Prince, Sir Walter Manny, and others of the 
greatest knights and captains of the age. Chaucer learned 
something too of war's reverses, for he was taken prisoner 
by the French and ransomed by the King for £16. After 
his return from the French campaign, Chaucer entered 
the service of the King. In 1367 he was granted a pension 
of twenty marks as "valet of the King's chamber" 
(valettus earner oe regis), and somewhat later he rose to the 
position of esquire. In 1369 he again took part in a cam- 
paign in France, and before 1379 he had been employed 
in no less than seven diplomatic missions to various 
places on the Continent. 

But, while Chaucer was thus making his way as courtier, 
soldier, and diplomatist, he had already begun his work 
_ , as a poet. He wrote love-lyrics in the French 

Early poems. 

manner, — "Balades, Rondel, and Virelayes," 
— most of which have been lost. He translated the 
Romance of the Rose (1360-65 ?). Several poems usually 
assigned to this early period of his work, allude to a dis- 
appointment in love, and are pervaded with a gentle sad- 
1 Bucbon's Froissart, i. 416. 



138 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

ness. But we cannot be sure that such passages are the 
outcome of a personal experience. Thus the Compleynte 
to Pitie is the lament of a despairing lover, who complains 
that Pity is dead, sundered from Love and Truth, and that 
Cruelty is enthroned in her stead. One of these early 
poems, The Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse (1369), was 
called forth by the death of Blanche of Castile, the wife of 
John of Gaunt, the poet's patron. The love of Nature, 
in her milder and fairer aspects, — of the soft grass, the 
birds, the flowers, and the green woods, — and a deep and 
reverent appreciation of the beauty of womanhood, these 
two traits so characteristic of Chaucer's maturer work, 
are already apparent in this poem. It is here that we 
find that melodious and charming description of happy 
girlhood, which takes its place beside the work of the great 
masters : 

"I saw hir daunce so comlily, 
Carole and singe so swetely 
Laughe and pleye so womanly, 
And loke so debonairly, 
So goodly speke and so frendly, 
That certes, I trow that evermore 
Nas seyn so blisful a tresore." 

Meanwhile — the exact date is not known — Chaucer had 
married a lady whose first name was Philippa. This lady 
. is supposed to have been Philippa Roet, a sister 

of the third wife of John of Gaunt. 
The King and his advisers appear to have found Chaucer 
a trustworthy and competent agent, for in 1372 he was 
First visit sen ^ on a diplomatic mission to Italy. He was 
to Italy, abroad nearly a year, visiting Florence and Genoa, 
and possibly meeting Petrarch, who was staying 
near Padua at the time. This journey to Italy, and a sub- 
sequent visit to Lombardy (1378-79), had a profound effect 
upon the development of Chaucer's genius. The French 



CHAUCER. 139 

were no longer the literary leaders of Europe; the age of 
troubadour and trouvkre was already passing. Italy had 
turned away from the Middle Ages, and was entering into 
a new world of the spirit. Chaucer's ability in practical 
affairs had secured for him, plain merchant's son as he was, 
an opportunity of entering this Italy of the early Renais- 
sance. He passed from his Northern island into that 
wonderful land of the South, once the mistress of the civi- 
lised world; from the land of mailed knights, to the land of 
the artist and the scholar; from the old world of the trou- 
vbre, to the new world of Petrarch and Boccaccio. In the 
midst of the fragments of an old civilisation, there were 
already signs of the awakening of a new art and culture. 
The devotion to beauty, characteristic of the coming era, 
showed itself in wonders of architecture, in paintings and 
frescoes; a new literature, inspired by enthusiasm for the 
masterpieces of antiquity, had already declared itself. 
Chaucer was the first great poet of England to feel that 
spell which Italy has exercised over so many English wri- 
ters from Shakespeare to Browning. His work testifies to 
the profound impression made upon him by his Italian 
journeys. In his literary apprenticeship he is the imitator 
and translator of the French poets; then, brought close to 
another descendant of the same Latin civilisation, he 
draws a fresh inspiration from Italy. 

After his return to England from this memorable first 
visit to Italy (1373), Chaucer received various marks of the 
Royal favour. He was made Comptroller of 
England. ^ ne Customs on Wool and Hides for the Port of 
London, granted a pension by John of Gaunt, and 
sent from time to time on missions to France and elsewhere. 
In 1382 he became Comptroller of the Petty Customs at 
London, and in 1386 he was returned to Parliament as one 
of the Knights of the Shire for Kent. About this time 
(1385-8), Chaucer may have actually gone upon a pilgrim- 



140 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

age to Canterbury, and found in his experience a hint for 
the setting of his Canterbury Tales. 

But Chaucer, like Shakespeare, possessed the rare power 
of keeping the ideal and the practical side of life in an even 
Troilus and balance, and during these active and prosper- 
Cressida, and ous years study and poetry were not neglected. 

er poems, gj^ ^ j^ g nouse a bove the gate of Aldgate he 
lived in a world of imagination and reminiscence. " There," 
writes M. Jusserand, " all he had known in Italy would re- 
turn to his memory, campaniles, azure frescoes, olive groves, 
sonnets of Petrarch, poems of Dante, tales of Boccaccio; 
he had brought back wherewithal to move and enliven 
'merry England' herself." 1 A number of poems bear the 
impress of his Italian studies. One poem contains a repro- 
duction of the triple rhyme of Dante's Divine Comedy ; 
another, left unfinished, is translated in part from the Te- 
seide of Boccaccio. A long and important poem, Troilus 
and Cressida (c. 1380-1383?), is based on Boccaccio's Filo- 
strato, while the uncompleted Hous of Fame shows the in- 
fluence of Dante. In his masterly version of the story of 
Troilus, the lover, and the beautiful but faithless Cressida, 
Chaucer is the precursor of the modern novelist. The chief 
characters are drawn with a subtle understanding of men 
and women; and, though something of the prolixity of the 
old romance still remains, the story is told with a consum- 
mate delicacy and skill that make it worthy of the great 
masters of English narrative verse. 

But a change in Chaucer's fortunes was at hand. So 
far his success as a courtier had given him many opportuni- 
Chancer ^ es ^bich proved of advantage to him in his art. 
becomes He had learned from prosperity, he was now to 
poor, 1386. feel the discipline of anot h er teacher. In 1386, 

the same year in which he had entered Parliament, he was 

suddenly reduced to comparative poverty. Edward III., 

« A Literary History of the English People, i. 290. 



CHAUCER. 141 

who had done so much for Chaucer, had died some years 
before this; and, during the minority of Richard II., now 
one and now another of the young king's uncles gained the 
chief power. In the absence of Chaucer's steady patron, 
John of Gaunt, the Duke of Gloucester gained control of 
affairs; and Chaucer was among those who lost their gov- 
ernment positions as a result of this political change. 
Among Chaucer's minor poems is a group of ballads in which 
he meditates upon the fickleness of Fortune, upon content- 
ment in adversity, on the vanity of wealth without noble- 
ness, and on kindred themes. It is highly probable that 
we have in these poems an indication of the spirit in which 
Chaucer met his misfortunes. The tone of these ballads 
is brave, sensible, and manly; they bring before us a man 
of sweet and kindly nature, sustained by religion, philos- 
ophy, and a sense of humour, who is able to take " fortune's 
buffets and rewards" with "equal thanks." So Chaucer 
defies ill fortune, refusing to sing, " I have lost my all, my 
time and my labour," at her bidding; 1 so, deprived of his 
offices, he declares philosophically that — 

"Gret reste stant in litel besinesse." 2 

No man, he says, is wretched unless he chooses to think 
himself so, 

"And he that hath himself hath sufficiance." 3 

The little poem the Ballad of Good Counseil, or Truth, 
seems to bring Chaucer very close to us: 

"That thee is sent, receyve i n buxumnesse, 
The wrasling for this worlde axeth a fal. 

Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse: 

Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stall 
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of all; 

Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede: 

And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede. " 

1 Balades de Visage sanz Peinture. 
5 Truth — {"Fie Fro the Presse"). 
5 Balades de Visage sanz Peinture. 



142 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

In these years of financial stress and "litel besinesse" 
Chaucer is supposed to have turned his leisure to good 
account and found "rest " in composing the 
^Tales' grater P a rt of his Canterbury Tales (1386-91?), 
the crowning work of his life. The Canter- 
bury Tales consists of a number of separate stories supposed 
to be told by the various members of a company of pilgrims, 
journeying together to the tomb of St. Thomas a Becket at 
Canterbury. In a general prologue we are told how these 
pilgrims met at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, the district 
opposite to London on the other side of the Thames; 
how they agreed to be fellow-travellers; how the jolly 
innkeeper, "Harry Bailly/ ? proposed that) each pilgrim 
should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two 
returning. There are, by way of interlude, prologues 
to the several stories thus told, which bind the whole 
series more firmly together and recall to us the general 
design. The idea of stringing distinct stories on some 
thread of connection is not an uncommon one. Boccaccio 
in his Decamerone linked together a collection of stories by 
a very simple expedient. A number of gay lords and 
ladies leave Florence during the plague, and, sitting to- 
gether in a beautiful garden, they amuse themselves by 
telling the tales that form the main part of the work. 
Chaucer's work is founded on a pilgrimage, one of the 
characteristic and familiar features of the life of the time. 
With rare tact he has selected one of the few occasions 
which brought together in temporary good-fellowship 
men and women of different classes and occupations. 
He is thus able to paint the moving life of the world about 
him in all its breadth and variety; he can give to stories 
told by such chance-assorted companions a dramatic 
character and contrast, making Knight, Priest, or Miller 
reveal himself in what he relates. 

The chief interest of the Prologue lies in the freshness 



CHAUCER. 143 

and truth with which each member of the little party 
of pilgrims is set before us. As one after another of that 
immortal procession passes by, the intervening centuries 
are forgotten, and we ourselves seem fourteenth-century 
pilgrims riding with the rest. It is a morning in the 
middle of April as we with the jolly company, thirty-two 
in all, with our host of the Tabard, Harry Bailly, as "gov- 
ernour," pass out of the square courtyard of the inn and 
take the highroad toward Canterbury. The freshness 
of the spring is all about us; showers and sunshine and 
soft winds have made the budding world beautiful in ten- 
der green, and the joy of the sweet season in the hearts 
of innumerable birds makes them put their gladness into 
song. This time, when the sap mounts in the trees, and 
the world is new-charged with the love of life, fills us 
with restless desires and the spirit of adventure. 

"Thanne longen folk to gon on pilgrimages." 

Our little company is made up of men and women of 
many sorts and conditions. There rides a Knight, a good 
type of all that is best in the chivalry of the time, who 
has fought bravely in fifteen mortal battles. His dress 
is stained, for he has just returned from a voyage; even 
the trappings of his horse are plain. In his bearing he 
is as meek as a maid. His son is with him, a gay young 
Squire with curled locks. He is a boy of twenty, over- 
flowing with life and happiness, splendid in apparel, and 
expert in graceful accomplishments. After the Knight 
and the Squire rides their attendant, clad in the green of 
the forester. He is the hero of the new order, as the 
Knight is the hero of the old. A very different figure is 
Madame Eglantyne, a coy and smiling Prioress, a teacher 
of young ladies, whose table manners are a model of de- 
portment, whose French smacks of the "school of Strat- 
ford atte Bo we." She is so sensitive that she weeps to 



144 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

see a mouse caught in a trap. Though pleasant and 
amiable, she affects court manners, and holds herself on 
her dignity that people may stand in awe of her. There 
ambles the rich, pleasure-loving Monk, " ful fat " and 
ruddy; one of those new-fashioned Churchmen of the 
day who have given up the strict monastic rule of an 
earlier time. He cares neither for learning nor to w r ork 
with his hands, but delights in hunting. The corruption 
of the Church is also to be seen in the next pilgrim, a 
brawny, jolly Friar, licensed to beg within a prescribed 
district. The Friar has no threadbare scholar's dress; his 
short cloak is of double worsted. His cowl is stuffed with 
knives and pins, for he is a pedlar, like many of his order. 1 
After the Merchant, sitting high on his horse, and 
always solemnly talking of his gains, comes the Clerk with 
his lean horse, and threadbare cloak. He is a philosopher; 
he has not prospered in the world, 

"For he hadde geten him yit no benefice 
Ne was so worldly for to have office. " 

Then the Sergeant-at-Law, who seems always busier 
than he is; the Franklin, or farmer, with his red face and 
beard white as a daisy; he keeps open house, the table 
standing always covered in his hospitable hall. 2 

Various occupations are represented by the Haber- 
dasher, the Dyer, the Tapicer, or dealer in carpets and 
rugs, the Cook, who can " roste and set he, and boille and 
fry," and make "blankmanger" with the best. The 

1 Wyclif writes of the friars: "They become peddlers, bearing 
knives, purses, pins, and girdles, and spices, and silk, and precious 
pellure, and fouris for women, and thereto small dogs." Quoted in 
Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life, p. 304. 

2 The Franklin held his land directly from the King and free of 
feudal service. In the fourteenth century the dining-tables were 
usually boards placed on trestles, and were taken away after each 
meal. The Franklin's was "dormant," i.e., permanent. See Wright's 
History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England, p. 139. 



CHAUCER. 145 

weather-beaten Shipman, whose beard has been shaken 
by many a tempest, seems not quite at ease on horse- 
back. The Doctor of Physic is a learned and successful 
practitioner, who knows the literature of his profession, 
and studies the Bible but little. He keeps all the gold 
he made in the pestilence: 

"For gold in physic is a cordial 
Therfor he lovede gold in special." 

Among all there is the buxom, dashing Wife of Bath, 
gaily dressed, with scarlet stockings, new shoes, and a 
hat as broad as a shield, and, in sharp contrast, the Parish 
Priest, the "pome persoun of a town," reminding us that, 
in spite of luxurious monks and cheating friars, the Church 
was not wholly corrupt. 

"Benigne he was, and wonder diligent, 
And in adversitee ful pacient. 



He wayted after no pompe and reverence, 
Ne maked him a spyced conscience, 
But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve, 
He taughte, but first he folwed it him-selve. " 

The party is made up by the Ploughman, the Reeve, 
or steward, the Miller, who carries a bagpipe, the Sum- 
moner, an officer of the law-courts, the Pardoner, or 
seller of indulgences, his wallet full of pardons, the Man- 
ciple, or caterer for a college, and last, the Poet himself, 
noting with twinkling eyes every trick of costume, and 
looking through all to the soul beneath. 

In this truly wonderful group the moving and varied 
life of Chaucer's England survives in all its bloom and 
freshness, in the vital power of its intense humanity. 
Student of books as Chaucer was, and teller of old tales, 
we see here and elsewhere the shrewd observer and inter- 
preter of life and character, the man with the poet's gift 
of fresh and independent vision. As we have said, the 



146 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

several stories in the Canterbury Tales are dramatic studies 
as well as masterpieces of narrative, as each narrator 
unconsciously reveals something of his own character in 
the tale he tells. Thus the Knight's Tale is steeped 
in the golden atmosphere of chivalry. Theseus, journey- 
ing homeward with his bride, Hippolyta, leaves her, as 
a true knight should, to champion the cause of woman 
in distress. The whole story revolves about the supreme 
power of love, a doctrine dear to the heart of mediaeval 
chivalry. 

"Wostow nat wel the olde clerkes sawe, 
That ' who shal yeve a lovere any la we? ' 
Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan, 
Than may be yeve to eny erthly man. " * 

At the call of this great and mighty god of Jove, the 
life-long friendship and affection of Palamon and Arcite 
are changed in an instant to rivalry and hatred, the solemn 
oaths which bind them to each other unhesitatingly 
disregarded. The story is rich and glorious in heraldric 
blazonry; the gorgeous description of the tournament 
sparkles and glitters with the lustre of that romantic and 
knightly world. Yet the Knight 7 s Tale is not wholly 
mediaeval. It was founded on the Teseide of Boccaccio, 
and its very origin reminds us that Chaucer touched 
the new world of the Renaissance, as well as the vanish- 
ing world of the Middle Ages, and the luxurious beauty 
of the description of the temple of Venus seems to breathe 
the spirit of beautiful and pagan Italy, which was to find 
its English reflex in the delicious verse of the Faerie Queene. 
The Knight takes us into his world of the gentles; so the 
drunken Miller, a consummate example of obtuse vul- 
garity, brutally strong and big of brawn and bones, inci- 
dentally acquaints us with life as he knows it; while the 
dainty Prioress, speaking from her sheltered nook of 

1 Knight's Tale, 1. 305, etc. 



CHAUCER. 147 

pious meditation, tells her tender story of a miracle, and, 
as we listen, we seem to hear the clear, young voice of 
the martyred child ring out fresh and strong. Among 
the most beautiful of the tales are those told by the Clerk 
and the Man of Law, two stories that in some respects 
may be placed together. Both reveal Chaucer's deep 
reserve of gentleness and compassion; both reveal his 
reverential love of goodness; both bring before us, as the 
central figure, a patient and holy woman, unjustly treated, 
and bearing all wrongs and griefs with meek submission. 
In the Clerk's Tale the unselfishness and wifely sub- 
mission of Griselda is placed in sharp contrast with the 
selfishness of her husband. The one gives herself up 
first to her father and then to her husband, making her 
bed "ful harde and no thing softe." The other gives him- 
self over wholly to present self-indulgence, even hesitat- 
ing to take a wife because he rejoices in his liberty that 

"Selde tyme is found in manage." 

When two such natures are brought together, the more 
unselfishness yields — the more selfishness takes. The 
ideal of womanhood revealed in Griselda is eminently 
mediaeval, and Chaucer admits that he does not expect 
women of his time to follow her humility, adding that 
he tells us the story to show that 

"Every wight in his degree 
Sholde be constant in adversitie 
As was Griselde." 

Fortitude may likewise be taken as the patron virtue of 
the Lawyer's Tale, as indeed the name of the heroine, Con- 
stance, seems to imply. But the story also shows the 
divine care of innocence in adversity. Over and over 
again is Constance placed in peril, only to be rescued by 
the Divine hand. She stands on the sea-shore, betrayed, 
and about to be set adrift with her new-born child. 



148 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

Even in the face of this deadly peril her faith remains 
unshaken : 

"He that me kepte fro the false blame 
While I was on the lond amonges yow, 
He kan me kepe from harm, and eek fro shame 
In salte see, al thogh I see noght how ; 
As strong as evere he was he is yet now. 



Her litel child lay wepying in her arm, 
And knelynge, pitously to hym she seyde, 
'Pees, litel sone, I wol do thee non harm!' 
With that hir kerchef of hir heed she breyde, 
And over hise litel eyen she it leyde, 
And in hir arm she lulleth it ful faste, 
And in-to hevene hire eyen up she caste. " * 

Words cannot be more simple or more tender, nor 
pathos more profound. We see all as in a picture: the 
sobbing country people crowding about the fair woman 
kneeling in their midst; the sacred beauty of motherhood, 
of suffering, of heroic faith; the boat ready at the water's 
edge, and, in melancholy perspective, the receding back- 
ground of the waiting sea. In such passages we feel the 
truth of Mrs. Browning's words: 

"Chaucer, with his infantine 
Familiar clasp of things divine. " 2 

The Man of Lawe's Tale may be set beside Milton's 
Comus as the story of that virtue which can be " assailed, 
but never hurt." "Great are the perils of the righteous, 
but the Lord delivereth him out of all;" this may be said 
to be the text of the story of Constance. 

In the Middle Ages it was not customary to invent new 
plots, and Chaucer, like many another poet, translated or 
adapted old stories gathered from many sources — French, 
Italian, or Latin. Critics have discovered the sources of 

1 Man of Lawe's Tale. 

' Mrs. Browning's Vision of Poets. 



CHAUCER. 149 

many of the Canterbury Tales, and it is quite possible that 
none of them were entirely original with Chaucer. But 
the literature of the world belongs to the supreme poet 
by right of eminent domain; and Chaucer, the teller of the 
Canterbury Tales, was not an imitator or translator, but a 
new creative force. Chaucer's originality became more 
pronounced as his genius matured. As we read his master- 
pieces we feel that he painted from life, and that, whether 
he borrowed from France or from Italy, he made a style 
of his own, breathing into it the breath of his own spirit. 

On the accession of Henry IV. in 1399, the son of 
Chaucer's old patron, John of Gaunt, the poet's fortunes 

again improved. Chaucer lost no time in 
ia^t UC ears bringing his poverty to the notice of the King, 

by sending him a humourous little poem, the 
Complaint of his Empty Purse. It was evidently in 
response to this appeal that Henry promptly granted a 
pension of forty marks a year to his father's old protege. 
But Chaucer had nearly clone with pensions and Court 
favour. He died on the 25th of October, 1400. 

Chaucer's relation to literary history has been already 
indicated. Through him those foreign influences which 

for three centuries had been enriching the 
STwork" 14 civili sation of England found expression in 

English poetry. He begins his work as " an Eng- 
lish trouvere" as the spiritual descendant of such poets as 
De Lorris and Machault. Ignorant of the poetry of the 
Anglo-Saxon, Chaucer's work marks a final break with 
the literary traditions native to the English people. Not 
only is he un-English in manner, but he also has a light- 
ness of touch, an easy cheerfulness, grace, and humour, 
very different from the sombre earnestness and ponderous 
strength of the Anglo-Saxon. He is indeed sensitive to 
suffering, quickly touched by the sadness "in mortal 
things;" but, like a light-hearted child, he turns away 



150 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

from this aspect of life with relief. In his own phrase, 
he is " so weary for to speke of sorwe." Arcite dies in 
the strength of his youth, and Chaucer accepts the fact 
with characteristic philosophy. It is tragic, but why 
should we cry over spilt milk? Can he thank us if 
we make ourselves miserable? "Nay, God woot, never a 
del." Let his rival and sworn brother be sensible. Why 
should he wish to die also? has he not "gold enough and 
Emery?" In such passages there is an avoidance of 
painful reflection, a Gallic gaiety foreign to the natural 
bent of the Teutonic mind. 

But we must not think of Chaucer as a mere trans- 
mitter, or Angliciser of foreign influences. His genius 
had another side. He chooses to write in the English 
language, while Ins contemporary, John Gower, com- 
poses the greater part of his poetry in Latin and in French. 
If he began by translating French romance, he became 
before he died the great painter of the contemporary life 
of England. His foot was firmly planted on English soil, 
and few poets of any age have surpassed him in his power 
to observe and reproduce the external aspects of the world 
around him. His genius is objective; he has a strong 
grasp of plain fact. He has no touch of morbid grief 
or of maudlin sentimentality. He hates shams; he is 
eminently frank, robust, and wholesome. Dryden called 
him a a perpetual fountain of good sense." Now in these 
things Chaucer seems essentially English. In his frank 
realism, his appreciation of human nature, he resembles 
Shakespeare and Scott; his broad humour, free from 
malice or restraint, suggests the robust presence and hearty 
laughter of Fielding. Chaucer, then, is neither Norman 
nor Saxon, but a mixture of both. He united the Norman 
spirit of romance with English solidity and common 
sense. His very language, a fusion of French and English, 
shows that in him a long process of amalgamation is nearly 



CHAUCER. 151 

completed, and that once separate elements are being 
welded into one. 

Nor must we forget that Italy, as well as France and 
England, contributed to the full development of Chaucer's 
Chaucer powers. Dante, the first great poet of Modern 
and the Europe, stands at the end of the Middle Ages; 
Renaissance. ch aucer ^ k orn three-quarters of a century later, 
stands at once at the close of the mediaeval and at the be- 
ginning of the modern world. The inheritance of the past 
and the promise of the future mingle in his work; and, like 
his century, he marks both the end of an old order and the 
beginning of a new. 

Genius is often associated with the excessive or abnor- 
mal development of a single faculty. In such cases one 
side of the man's nature grows at the expense 
poet UCeraS °f ^ e res ^- From this besetting weakness of 
genius, Chaucer is conspicuously free. The 
artist in him did not warp or spoil the man; the varied life 
of the man contributed to the triumph of the artist. Per- 
haps the most remarkable fact about Chaucer is his ability 
to keep each of the diverse elements that make up life in 
its proper place, and his ability to use all, while he pre- 
vented any one from gaining an undue ascendency. As 
we have seen, he lived with men, with books, and with 
nature; he was busy and successful in life's practical ac- 
tivities, and a poet; he was a man of this world and a 
dweller in that other world of art. Chaucer's healthy con- 
tact with life and his marvellous equipoise of character 
give a sane, wholesome, normal quality to his work. In 
his power to harmonise the ideal and the practical, he re- 
sembles Shakespeare and Walter Scott. He is truthful, 
setting down what he sees honestly and naturally; he can 
enjoy life with almost the frank delight of a child, capable 
of laughter without malice; and, boisterous or coarse as he 
may sometimes seem, he is at heart surprisingly gentle and 



152 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 

compassionate. If he is the poet of the Wife of Bath, he 
is also the poet of Griselda and Constance. He reveres a 
good woman; he writes of little children with a wonderful 
tenderness. He is not bitter, rebellious, or complaining, 
but accepts what life gives him with a cheerful courage and 
manly resignation. There is something natural, almost 
childlike, in his delight in birds and grass, in flowers and 
sunshine, in "Maytime and the cheerful dawn." He is 
among the greatest comic writers; the father of English 
humour, he has a Shakespearean sympathy with the follies 
or the absurdities which he describes. When Chaucer wrote, 
our English language, with its more frequent vowel sounds, 
was softer and smoother in men's mouths, and Chaucer, the 
master of this melodious English, is one of the most musical 
of English poets. When we compare the line, 

"And smale fowles maken melodie," 

with 

"And the small birds make melody," 

or some such modern equivalent, we see that the English of 
Chaucer's day, as he used it, could rival the liquid flow of 
the Italian. 

Chaucer added to these varied gifts, the power of telling 
a story in a clear, rapid, and effective manner. He was a 
great narrative, as well as an excellent descriptive, poet. 
He could reveal his characters through action, interest us 
in their adventures, and bring before us striking scenes or 
situations with vividness and dramatic force. The Par- 
doner's Tale is a good example of his narrative and dra- 
matic skill. This gift is rare among the English poets; 
and the strength of some of even the greatest, — Spenser, 
Milton, and Wordsworth, — lies rather in other direc- 
tions. 

With all this comprehensive excellence, there were as- 
pects of life that Chaucer touched lightly or ignored. He 



CHAUCER. Ib3 

pictures men and women of various social conditions, from 
the knight to the miller and the ploughman, but he shows 

breadth of observation rather than breadth of 
Court!* the sympathy for the miseries or wrongs of the poor. 

The laureate of the Court, something of the 
courtier clings to him, and he remains the poet of a feudal 
society, the outcome of the voice of chivalry in its class 
distinctions and exclusiveness, as well as its splendour. His 
easy-going nature has in it no touch of the reformer, the 
martyr, or the fanatic. He takes the world as it is; he 
loves the good, but the sight of the evil stirs in him no 
deeps of moral indignation; on the contrary, he often 
regards grossness and vulgarity with an amused tolerance. 
He painted Mediaeval life in its outward aspects, while 
Dante, revealing its soul, probed to the centre. He seems 
to dwell at his ease in his broad, sunshiny world of green 
fields and merry jests; but if he took life and its graver 
issues lightly, this buoyant good-humour is not only his 
limitation but also his enduring charm. 



PART II. 

THE PERIOD OF THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE. 

(About 1400 to about 1660.) 

CHAPTER I. 

THE FOLLOWERS OF CHAUCER AND THE DECLINE 
OF MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE. 

In following the course of English literature from its 
obscure beginnings, we are conscious, as we reach the 
fifteenth century, of an unmistakable loss or suspension 
of our interest. There is a pause in the action of the 
great drama, and the tension is suddenly relaxed. The 
stage seems empty, deserted as it is by those typical and 
striking characters on whom our attention has so lately 
been fixed. When the century opens, Wychf has been 
dead some fifteen years, and the Government has already 
set itself to undo his work and to suppress his followers. 
Langland and the poet of Sir Gawayne have ended their 
labours, and, above all, Chaucer is just dead, "the maister 
dere and fadir reverent, " and his death is lamented as an 
irreparable loss to poetry. 1 Chaucer indeed has suc- 
cessors, facile and industrious writers who can turn out a 
prodigious quantity of verse; but most of them bring no 
strong original impulse to poetry; they are imitators; and 
their productions, huge as they are, cannot fill the void 
left by the master's departure. The very fact that these 
poets are copyists places them at a disadvantage, for it 

1 See Occleve's tribute to Chaucer in the Prologue to his Gouvernail 
of Princes. 

166 



156 THE FOLLOWERS OF CHAUCER. 

forces us to compare their inferior work with that of their 
great model. Some beautiful and vigorous work was in- 
deed done in Scotland where the poetry of Chaucer took 
root in a fresh and fertile soil, but the English successors 
of the great master are hardly more than names to the 
reader of to-day. 

One of these poets, Thomas Occleye, or Hoccleve (cir. 
1370-c. 1450), a clerk in the Exchequer, appears to have 
known Chaucer personally, and came directly under the 
elder poet's influence. His tribute to Chaucer, in the 
Prologue to the Gouvemail of Princes, shows both admira- 
tion and affection for his friend and master. But the 
greater part of Occleve is dreary reading, and we have no 
difficulty in believing him when he says : 

"My dere maister — God his soule quyte — 
And Fader Chaucer, fayne would have me taught, 
But I was dulle, and lerned lytle or naught. " * 

John Lydgate (cir. 1370-1451) was another of this 
Chaucerian school. He was a monk at the Benedictine 
Monastery of Bury St. Edmund, in Suffolk; a learned 
man, and a pitilessly prolific writer. He tells us that 
Chaucer helped him with some of his early poems, amend- 
ing the work of his "rude penne," and, like Occleve, he 
calls Chaucer " maister. " He employed Chaucer's favour- 
ite metres, but missed the great poet's smoothness and 
melody. Indeed, he realised the deficiencies of his own 
versification, and in one of his poems, written after 
Chaucer's death, he regrets the loss of his master's help. 
" I had no guide," he says, and so, — 

"I toke none hede nouther of shorte nor longe." 3 

His Complaint of the Black Knight is an imitation of 

1 Prologue to Gouvemail of Princes (De Regimine Princijmm) 
Occleve' s longest and principal work. 

2 History of Troy quoted in Social England., voL ii. 378. 



LYDGATE. 157 

Chaucer's Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse, and his Story 
of Thebes was intended as an addition to the Canterbury 
Tales. 

Lydgate appears to have set himself seriously to the 
writing of poetry about 1420, when he was already some 
forty years old, and it is estimated that he bequeathed 
one hundred and fifty thousand lines of verse to posterity. 
Stephen Hawes (d. cir. 1520-30), who was Groom of the 
Chamber to Henry VII., carried this French or Chaucerian 
poetry on into the sixteenth century. He addresses 
Lydgate, "the most dulcet spryng of famous rethoryke," l 
as his master; but his long and tedious allegory, mis- 
named The Pastime of Pleasure, takes us back to the 
Romaunt of the Rose. This poem deals with the educa- 
tion of the perfect knight, and in its subject and purpose 
dimly foreshadows Spenser's Faerie Queene. Fifteenth- 
century England produced many other poems in the 
Chaucerian manner, some of which were long attributed to 
Chaucer himself. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale (between 
1403-1410), which Milton admired enough to imitate, 
is slight but very graceful and pleasing. It is attributed 
to Sir Thomas Clanvowe, a courtier in the reigns of 
Richard II. and Henry IV. and a friend of " Prince Hal. " 2 

At last men began to tire of the established poetic 
form and manner and to seek for something new. In the 
early years of the sixteenth century a restless search for 
novelty in metre and style is exemplified in the rude dog- 
gerel rhymes of John Skelton (1460?-1529). This eccen- 
tric and enigmatical poet was a clergyman in Norfolk. 
He was a noted scholar, and was at one time tutor to 
Henry VIII., but in his later life he gained a most un- 

1 The Pastime of Pleasure, canto xiv. 

2 This poem is included in Skeat's Chaucerian and Other Pieces. 
Some account of its author is given in the Introduction. The poem of 
Milton's referred to above (to which Professor Skeat calls attention) is 
the sonnet To the Nightingale. 



158 THE FOLLOWERS OF CHAUCER. 

savoury reputation. In the early part of his career lie 
wrote some poems of a rather conventional character, 
such as his Dirge on the Death of Edward IV. (1483); but 
he abandoned this tamer manner for the extraordinary 
and more original style with which he is chiefly associated. 
The characteristic Skeltonic verse is short -lined and highly 
alliterative; it is full of double rhymes, and bristles with 
fragments of Latin and French. We are overwhelmed 
by a rapid, rattling discharge of words that strike us in 
quick succession like the pelting of hailstones. There is, 
moreover, a reckless and breathless volubility which at 
times approaches positive incoherence. Singular as was 
his manner, Skelton attacked some grave abuses with 
boldness and vigour, and he warns us that a serious mean- 
ing is under this grotesque exterior: 

"For though my rime be ragged, 
Tattered and jagged, 
Rudely rayne beaten, 
Rusty and moothe eaten, 
If ye talke well therewith 
It hath in it some pith. " 

His Boke of Colin Clout, that is of the simple rustic, the 
representative, like Piers Plowman, of the moral sense of 
the nation, from which the lines just quoted are taken, is 
a general indictment of ecclesiastical corruption. Another 
satire, Why Come Ye not to Court f is a daring assault upon 
Cardinal Wolsey, then "in the plenitude of his power." 
Perhaps his best known work is his whimsical Boke of 
Philip Sparrow, which celebrates the death of a pet bird. 
This has undoubted merit, but it suffers from that elab- 
orate verbosity characteristic of his style. Skelton has 
been compared to Rabelais and to Dean Swift, and un- 
doubtedly, while inferior to them in ability, he had some 
traits in common with those great men. His work on the 
whole is coarse and earthly, with hardly a gleam of poetic 



CHAUCER IN SCOTLAND. 159 

beauty; but, while his verse has little intrinsic value, he 
at least helped poetry to break its bounds. 

But while a large amount of verse was composed in Eng- 
land, under the dominant influence of Chaucer, if we would 

find the most brilliant and original development 
Scotland" 1 °f ^ s poetry we must cross the Scottish Border. 

So far the Scotch had contributed very little to 
English literature ; but now, for a hundred years or more, 
the Scotch poets surpassed their English rivals. A partial 
explanation of this striking fact is found in the conditions 
of Scotland at this time. Early in the fourteenth century 
the Scotch had won their independence at Bannockburn 
(1314) after a hard and glorious struggle. A little later the 
intense patriotism of the Scot, and the pride of national 
independence, found expression in John Barbour's poem 
of the Bruce (cir. 1375), which chronicles the trials and final 
victory of the nation's hero. The fire of the old poet breaks 
out in that passionate and excellent apostrophe to Free- 
dom which can stir men's hearts to-day: 

"A! Fredome is a noble thing! 
Fredome mayse man to haif liking; 
Fredome all solace to man giffis, 
He livis at ese that frely livisl" 

Scotland, it is true, was still an unsettled, and in the re- 
moter portions an almost barbarous country. It was full of 
discordant and warring elements. But it was free, its pa- 
triotism had already found a voice through poetry, and 
the best minds of Scotland were ready to appropriate and 
respond to the stimulus of foreign culture. At this critical 
time, King James I. (1394-1437) returned to Scotland after 
eighteen years of captivity in England. The king was one 
of the most accomplished and highly cultured princes of 
his time. He knew something of law and of philosophy, 
he was expert in all knightly exercise, he excelled in manly 
sports, and he was a skilful musician. He loved poetry, 



160 THE FOLLOWERS OF CHAUCER. 

and he looked up to Chaucer and Gower as his masters in 
the art, pronouncing them "superlative as poetis laureate." 
When he came back to Scotland in 1424, he accordingly 
brought with him the best culture and the prevailing poetic 
taste of the South. And James was himself a poet. 1 In 
his King's Quair (King's Quire, or Book), he tells the story 
of his love for the Lady Jane Beaufort, his future bride. 
Coming to the window of his prison-tower to hear the song 
of the nightingale, he sees a lady at her orisons in the gar- 
den below, so beautiful that from henceforth he becomes 
her willing "thrall.". Or, in Rossetti's words, 

" — the nightingale through his prison wall 
Taught him both lore and love. " 2 

In its poetic form the King's Quair is highly artificial. 
Not only are there obvious reminiscences of Chaucer, but 
the hackneyed conventions of the French love-poets are 
freely employed. But with all this the King's Quair is not 
merely a frigid poetical exercise. When we get beneath the 
conventional dress and trite reflections, we reach the real 
lover. It is true that the prince may not have seen the 
lady at the precise place and time he describes, — the situ- 
ation is indeed suspiciously poetical. But the important 
matter is not when he saw her, but that he loved her, and 
that his book is the genuine record of that love. Imitator 
as he was, we feel that the deepest source of the poet's in- 
spiration was not Chaucer but Lady Jane Beaufort. 

Robert Henryson (1425?-1506?), the next notable name 

in this line of Scottish Chaucerians, surpassed his royal 

predecessor in originality and native force. Lit- 

enryson. ^ . g k nown f ki m k e y 0nc i ^he fact that he was 

"a schoolmaster in Dunfermline." So far as is known, his 

1 It is proper to say that modern scepticism has denied that James 
wrote the King's Quair, or any other poems. 

2 Rossetti, The King's Tragedy. 



HENRYSON. 161 

Robyne and Makyne, a very human and simple little piece, 
is the earliest English pastoral. His Testament of Cresseid, 
a continuation of the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Cres- 
sida, shows appreciation of Nature, a gift of vivid descrip- 
tion, and not a little tragic power. The faithless and once 
beautiful Cressida has become a leper, driven to beg in 
company with others who suffer from that terrible disease. 
Troilus sees her as he rides by. Something in the wretched 
outcast vaguely reminds him of Cressida, and he throws 
her an alms. After her death w T hen the news of her fate is 
brought to Troilus, his words have a tragic restraint, a 
compressed passion, not unworthy of Shakespeare: 

"I can no moir, 
She was untrue, and wo is me thairfoir!" 

On her tomb he puts this inscription: 

"Lo! fair ladyis, Cresseid of Troyis town, 
Sumtyme countit the flour of woman heid, 
Under this stane, late Upper, lye's deid!" 

But Henryson did more than reproduce the romantic poe- 
try of the past. He was an independent observer, and in 
his Fables he delineated the every-day and humble aspects 
of life with insight and a kindly humour. 

The third in this succession was William Dunbar (1460? 
- 1520 ?), who is commonly considered the greatest poet 
of the British Isles "in the interval between 
Chaucer and Spenser." Dunbar is the true 
predecessor of Burns. He has the same power of graphic 
portraiture; the same coarse wit; the same delight in 
mingling the homely, the vulgar, the horrible, and the 
grotesque. Nor do the two poets seem to have been un- 
like in character. Dunbar appears to have been a man 
of strong and conflicting passions. He is by turns a 
bitter satirist and a lover of natural beauty. He is reli- 
gious, and a master of coarse and scurrilous invective. 



162 THE FOLLOWERS OF CHAUCER. 

He shows an uproarious delight in the things of this life, 
and he is oppressed by the sadness and emptiness of exist- 
ence. Now, in the spirit of Chaucer's Good Counsel, he 
bids us to "be blythe in heart for any a venture," and 
again the fear of death takes hold of him, and he declares 
that "all earthly joys return in pain." The little that 
is known of his life is in keeping with his vigorous and 
complex character. Born, as is supposed, in the East- 
Lothian district, in the middle years of the fifteenth 
century, he became a begging friar of the Franciscan 
Order. But he was unsuited to a friar's habit; and (as 
he says), he "made good cheer in every flourishing town 
in England betwixt Berwick and Calais." The friar's 
life seemed to him full of deceit, and he accordingly left 
the Order, and attached himself to the Scottish Court. 
One of his poems, The Thistle and the Rose (1503), cele- 
brates the marriage of his royal patron James IV. with 
the Princess Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII. , a mar- 
riage which united the Scotch thistle and the English 
rose. His masculine and vigorous genius is shown in 
his Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, a gruesome vision 
which reminds the reader of the witches' revel in Tarn 
o' Shanter. Among his shorter poems his Lament for the 
Makers is probably the best known. It was written in 
a time of sickness, and is a meditation on the universal 
conquests of death. After lamenting the fate of Chaucer, 
Gower, and other poets whom death had already taken, 
Dunbar declares that he will be the next to be summoned. 
Familiar as is its theme, the Lament is an impressive and 
dignified requiem, and its solemn refrain, 

" Timor Mortis conturbat me," 

reverberates through the poem like a bell tolling for the 
departed. 
Although Dunbar was the chief "maker," the poet 



DUNBAR. 163 

laureate, at the court of James IV., he was by no means 
the only poet of the time. He lived in a "Golden Age" 
of Scottish poetry; an age of intellectual activity and of 
general progress, when Scotland was assuming a more im- 
portant place among the powers of Europe. But 
literature tilis P 1 * ^ 688 does not begin with James IV. 
In spite of frequent lapses, Scotland had been 
growing more law-abiding and more enlightened ever since 
the iron rule of James I. (1424-1437); and indeed the 
whole period, from the end of the fourteenth to the 
beginning of the seventeenth century, was a memora- 
ble one in the history of her literature. This literature 
lies beyond our present limits, but certain facts in regard 
to Scottish literature as a whole ought to be briefly noted. 
Unlike the early literature of Wales, Scottish literature, as 
the phrase is commonly used, is not distinctively the 
product of the Celt. It is composed within the politi- 
cal limits of Scotland, but it is not written in Gaelic 
but in the local form of English. It is true that 
there were poets in the wild regions of the North, 
in the outlying islands and the places comparatively 
inaccessible to English influence, who recited in Gaelic 
the legends of the Celt. But this Gaelic poetry lies 
outside the boundaries of the national literature, as we 
do not look to the Orkneys or the Hebrides for the 
national poets of Scotland, but to the Lowlands — the 
country of Scott or of Burns. Clearly the civilisation 
and literature of Scotland begin in the Lowlands, in that 
part of the country nearest to England; and from the 
Lowlands, civilisation pushes northward, gradually dis- 
placing the Gaelic by the English speech. The eastern 
Lowlands, the historic border-country north of the 
Cheviot Hills, was a source and a centre of civilisation. 
This beautiful region of the Lothian, and of " Ettrick and 
Teviotdale, " of the Hills of Lammermuir and the Valley 



164 THE FOLLOWERS OF CHAUCER. 

of the Tweed, is associated with the vague beginnings of 
Scottish (or Anglo-Scottish) poetry, for here are the 
Eildon Hills where, according to tradition, Thomas the 
Rhymer was held captive by the Queen of the Fairies. 
And this Lothian district has been the literary centre of 
Scotland almost from that time until now. It was the 
birthplace of Dunbar, John Knox, Hume, James Thom- 
son, Walter Scott, and many of the greatest Scottish 
scholars and men of letters. It is the seat of Edinburgh, 
the city winch was called "the modern Athens. ;; Xow 
this region was from its situation, not only peculiarly 
open to English influences, it had once been English 
ground. In Saxon times it was included in the Anglian 
Kingdom of Xorthumbria, winch stretched as far north 
as the Frith of Forth. The region which was to be the 
heart of Scotland was thus peopled and ruled by the com- 
patriots of Caedmon, Bede, and Alcuin, and Edinburgh 
itself was the capital of an English kingdom long before 
it was the capital and the literary centre of a Scotch one. 
When, nearly five centuries after the establishment of 
Xorthumbria, this region was included within the limits 
of Scotland, it remained substantially English in manners, 
language, and population. Speaking broadly. Scottish liter- 
ature is thus the product of the Lowlands, where the Eng- 
lish elements are the most pronounced, and it is in that part 
of Scotland where the English influences are the strongest 
and where the English race has the greatest ascendency 
that nearly all its greatest triumphs have been won. 

Having traced the outcome of Chaucer's influence in 
Scotland and noted its culmination a century after Chau- 
„ ,. ^ ,.. cer's death in the poetrv of Dimbar. we must 

English lit- ill p i- 

erature of go back and take up the story ol literature 

the fifteenth ' m England. We have seen that poetrv in 

England after the death of Chaucer showed no 

spirit of progress. The poets are unable to take the old 



SCOTTISH LITERATURE. 165 

materials and transmute them into something new. " They 
are no longer able to discover new ways ; instead of looking 
forward as their master did, they turn, and stand with 
their eyes fixed on him, and hands outstretched towards 
his tomb." 1 To make matters worse, these poets do not 
seem to have realised the superiority of their master's 
greatest work. Chaucer himself outgrew his dependence 
on French models; but his English successors often chose 
to follow him in his earlier manner, and in doing this they 
were struggling to keep alive poetic conventions that 
were worn out and doomed to pass away. This French 
poetry and culture had done a great work for England; 
but now its force was largely spent, and France for the 
time had nothing more to give. Troubadour and trouvbre 
belonged to a world that was already growing antiquated; 
and Italy, not France, was becoming the intellectual 
leader and inspirer of Europe. But while bookish writers 
like Occleve and Lydgate drew little inspiration from 
the life that was within and around them, and so became 
conventional and pedantic, true poetry survived among 
the people in ballads and songs. The existence of this 
popular poetry from a very early period has been already 
alluded to, and nothing further need be said here upon 
the much discussed question of its origin and growth. 
It is enough to say that the fifteenth century was a great 
ballad-making epoch, that from about the middle of this 
period, some of the ballads were written down, and that 
in the beginning of the sixteenth century they found their 
way into print. Something may appropriately be said 
here, however, about this ballad poetry as a whole. 

We are accustomed to speak of the naturalness and 

simplicity of the old ballads; but we must remember that 

the ballad has its settled conventions, its distinguishing 

poetic form and style. It has its own "poetic diction/' 

1 Jusserand: A Literary History of the English People, i. 495. 



166 THE FOLLOWERS OF CHAUCER. 

as well marked as that found in poetry of the most highly 
wrought and artificial character. There are 
ballads. certain stock phrases, certain tricks of verbal 
repetition, certain refrains, which were the com- 
mon property of the ballad-makers, and they recur in 
ballad after ballad with little or no variation. More than 
this, there is a general similarity of tone and method, the 
same outlook on life. The union of all these and other 
characteristics puts ballad poetry in a class by itself. The 
ballads create for us a world of the imagination, less uni- 
formly noble and majestic than the ampler world of the 
epic, but with a fascination peculiarly its own. 

And, in spite of what has just been said about the con- 
ventions of ballad poetry, this fascination comes largely 
from the artlessness and simplicity of the ballads and from 
their essential truth to human nature. The stereotyped 
phrases are not stuck in as meaningless ornaments, they 
are used to help out the imperfect art of the narrator. 
They are convenient formulae for the improviser, or for 
the poet whose range of expression is small; but through 
them, or in spite of them, the genuineness and integrity of 
the poet's feeling makes itself felt or tears its way. And 
so it happens that in reading the ballads we often come 
upon jets of pure poetry, in the midst of comparatively 
crude or uninspired verse, that show the force of the 
central fires. Such an outburst is the revulsion of feeling 
in Edom o' Gordon as he looks on the woman he has slain: 

" Then wi' his spear he turn'd her owrej 

gin her face was wan ! 

He said, ' Ye are the first that e'er 

1 wish'd alive again. ' 



'Busk and boun, my merry men a', 
For ill dooms I do guess ; — 

I cannot look on that bonnie face 
As it lies on the grass. ' " 



THE OLD BALLADS. 167 

Such is the cry of Margaret to her dead lover in Clerk 
Saunders: 

"'Is there ony room at your head, Saunders? 
Is there ony room at your feet? 
Is there ony room at your side, Saunders, 
Where fain, fain, I wad sleep?'" 

And such are the three beautiful stanzas, beginning 
with a sustained and musical lyric movement and passing 
to a more retarded and solemn ending, which form the 
conclusion of Sir Patrick Spens. 

These ballads then, rough and coarse as they often are, 
are securely based on nature. In Carlyle's phrase, they 
have "got the grip of it." They have one essential of 
great poetry, a true and deep sense of the wonder and 
pathos, the heroism and the tragedy, of human life. The 
Twa Corbies is a tragic masterpiece, abrupt, vivid, ghastly ; 
Browning's Last Duchess is not more wonderful in con- 
centration or in its power to suggest a story which is left 
half told. The Nut-Brown Maid, charming and musical 
from first to last, holds an assured place in the love- 
poetry of the literature. 1 In these ballads too we find 
the old fighting spirit of the race : 

"For Witherington my heart was wo, 
That ever he slain should be ; 
For when both his legs were hewn in two, 
Yet he kneeled and fought on his knee. " 

And while there are no traces of that more subtle " feel- 
ing for nature" so common in modern literature, there 
is yet a robust and wholesome satisfaction in the "merry 
greenwood" and the free life out of doors. There is 
something charming in the refrain — 

"And the birk and the broom blooms bonnie," 
and there is a breath of the woods in the familiar lines — 

1 Prof essor Gummere points out that The Nut-Brown Maid, although 
commonly classed with the ballads, is rather a lyrical dialogue. 



168 THE FOLLOWERS OF CHAUCER. 

"When shaws been sheene, and shradds full fayre, 
And leves both large and longe, 
Itt is merry e walking in the fayre forrest, 
To hear the smale birdes songe. " 

As we should expect, the magical and the mysterious 
too, have their place in this world of the ballad. In the 
ballads there is a road to "fair elfland," the ghosts of dead 
loves appear at midnight, witches have "power to charm," 
and mermaids can wreck sailors. Among much that is 
gruesome, we find at times that lavish splendour, and that 
superiority to sordid fact, which helps to create the glamour 
of fairyland. What a ship this is for a maiden to sail in 
to seek for her "true love" — 

"Her mast was cover'd wi' beaten gold 
And it shone across the sea; 
The sails were o' the grass-green silk, 
And the ropes o ' taff atie. " 

The fact that the fifteenth century was a great ballad- 
making epoch is significant. The accredited representa- 
tives of English poetry at this time might seem uninspired, 
and poetry, even to their eyes, might seem fallen into a 
decline, but while the people made ballads and songs and 
listened to them with delight, the power to create poetry 
and to love it was still in the nation, and sooner or later 
under favourable conditions that power might be expected 
to make itself felt. 

Meanwhile, and more particularly from about the middle 
years of the century, English prose was slowly gaining in 
range and effectiveness. Theological contro- 
fentuirprose vers y * s represented by Reginald Peacock's 
Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy 
(c. 1455), a vigorous attack upon the Lollards; law, by 
Sir John Fortescue's Difference between an Absolute and 
a Limited Monarchy; and history, by sundry chronicles. 
But the noblest prose-work of this time is a work of pure 



FIFTEENTH CENTURY PROSE. 169 

romance, the Morte d' Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory. 
The Morte oV Arthur was written in 1470, in the reign of Ed- 
ward IV. It was mainly compiled out of certain French 
romances, translated and pieced together so as to form a 
tolerably consecutive narrative, "a most pleasant jumble 
and summary of the legends about Arthur. ' ' But we should 
not think of Malory as a mere translator and compiler; in 
combining and retelling these old stories he had produced a 
classic. Malory's Morte aV Arthur is the greatest prose-ro- 
mance of our literature, the accepted version of the national 
legend. These stories had been often told, but Malory's 
version of them superseded all others for the great majority 
of English readers. It is Malory who gathers and preserves 
the spirit of Romance and hands it on to a later time. Lit- 
tle or nothing is known of him. Recent researches make it 
probable that he was an adherent of the Earl of Warwick, 
involved, like so many others, in the civil strifes of the time. 
But we are at least sure that the man who gave us this 
"noble and joyous book" of chivalry, lived in a base and 
cruel age, 

"That hover'd between war and wantonness, 
And crownings and dethronements. " x 

Never before had the nobility of England fallen so far 
from the old ideals of knightly honour as in this miserable 
epoch of political assassinations, duplicity, and broken faith. 
Yet it was a knight of this age, which saw the destruction 
of the feudal baronage of England, who transmitted to 
later times the chivalric ideals of the past. It is to Mal- 
ory's book that the English poets turned in the romantic 
periods of the literature. In the sixteenth century, Spen- 
ser, the poet of chivalry, read it; and, in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, Tennyson made out of it his Idylls of the King. It 
was published by Caxton, the father of printing in Eng- 

1 Tennyson's Idylls of the King: Epilogue "To the Queen." 



170 THE FOLLOWERS OF CHAUCER, 

land, in 1485; and six editions of it had appeared between 
that time and 1634. To the first printer it seemed to teach 
a lesson, — the same lesson that Spenser afterwards taught 
in the Faerie Queene. "I have set it down in print." Cax- 
ton wrote, "to the intent that noble men may see and learn 
the noble acts of chivalry, the gentle and virtuous deeds 
that some knights used in those days, by which they came 
to honour, and how that they that were vicious were pun- 
ished, and oft put to shame and rebuke; — Do after the 
good, and leave the evil, and it shall bring you unto good 
fame and renown." 

When we look at this fifteenth-century literature as a 
whole, we see that it is almost a mere continuation of that 

which has gone before. Malory's Marie d'Ari 
survey. was probably the most memorable and perma- 
nently important book of the period, yet even 
Malory's work was a remnant of the Middle Ages made up 
out of fragments of the past. Good work was done, but 
it must be admitted that, while the fifteenth century ma}' 
have been somewhat extravagantly abused, it cannot fairly 
be included among the great creative periods of the litera- 
ture. One reason for this has already been pointed out : 
England stood in need of a new inspiration, and at the 
same time adverse conditions combined to delay its com- 
ing. Having followed the course of English literature 
during this interval and noted that it sprang mainly from 
French and mediaeval sources, we must now glance at the 
progress of the new culture in Italy and then consider its 
entrance into England. 



CHAPTER II. 
THE BEGINNING OF THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE. 

The enthusiasm for art and letters, already apparent in 
Italy in the time of Chaucer, had since then continued to 
The revival increase. The leading minds among the Italians 
of learning began to turn from the logic and theology of 
the Middle Ages to the great writers of antiquity. 
Petrarch, "the Columbus of the new spiritual hemi- 
sphere," led the way to the classics, and inspired men 
with a new spirit. Petrarch himself lived before the 
revival of the study of Greek, but it was not long after his 
death before a knowledge of Greek life and literature 
stirred Italy with the power of a fresh revelation. About 
1395, Manuel Chrysoloras, who had been an ambassador 
to Italy from Constantinople, began to teach Greek in 
Florence, and the study of classical antiquity became a 
passion. For a time Italy had the monopoly of this 
"new learning": then students came from beyond the 
Alps to sit at the feet of her great teachers, and in the 
fifteenth century she was the university of Europe. Art 
and learning found rich and powerful patrons. This is 
the century of Cosmo di Medici (1389-1464), the great 
banker-prince, who fostered the culture and destroyed 
the^ liberties of Florence; the century in which his 
grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent (1448-1492) was the 
centre of brilliant and eager representatives of the new 
culture. In painting, it was the century of the Pre- 
Raphaelites, of Fra Angelico, Botticelli, and Ghirlandajo ; 
in sculpture, of Ghiberti, Donatello, and Lucca delta Robbia. 
And it was the century in Italy of a growing moral cor- 

171 



172 THE BEGINNING OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

ruption, which Savonarola tried in vain to cure. In the 
very citadels of the Church the spirit of a revived pagan- 
ism was gaining the ascendency, and men were forsaking 
the Christian ideals, for the worship of beauty, pleasure, 
culture, and philosophy. At the end of the century 
Alexander Borgia, a man of revolting wickedness, was in 
the Papal chair. Italy was thus vibrating with life, 
agitated and confused by the opposition of rival ideals, 
swept on into the wildest excesses; she was at once a 
nursery of vice, and the centre of that love of beauty and 
culture which it was her mission to dispense. This culture 
was to be built into the fabric of modern European civi- 
lisation; it was to reinvigorate the genius of England, 
and help to promote there the greatest creative epoch of 
her literature. 

In our general survey of the state of England during the 
fourteenth century, we saw that the institutions and 
ideals inherited from the Middle Ages were already begin- 
ning to be supplanted by a more modern spirit. In the 
fifteenth century, this contest between the old and the 
new order was fought out to its conclusion; and before its 
close England had passed out of the Middle Ages, and 
entered upon a new stage of growth. During this inter- 
val of transition, the old feudal organisation of society was 
destroyed, provision was made for a more general educa- 
tion by the foundation of schools and colleges, the printing 
press was established, the "new learning" was introduced, 
and signs of a spiritual awakening in matters of religion 
became apparent. These radical and comprehensive 
changes were not accomplished by a gradual and peace- 
able process of growth. In many instances the old order 
passively or actively resisted the progress of the new, 
and in the early part of the century the forces of con- 
servatism gained a temporary and partial advantage. The 
strength of this reactionary spirit is shown in the attitude 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 173 

of the authorities towards the liberal ideas of Wyclif and 
his followers. Henry IV. supported the claim of the 

Church to absolute authority in matters of belief, 
persecution. an ^ * n 1401 an act was passed, De hceretico 

comburendo, which provided that heretics should 
be burned to death. This was the first law of this char- 
acter ever enacted in England. Henry V. (1413-1422) 
set himself to stamp out the Lollards, who were still very 
numerous; and by 1417, when their leader Sir John Old- 
castle was executed, their influence was practically at an 
The decline enc ^- This hostility towards freedom of thought 
of learning was a drag on the progress of the Universities, 

and especially at Oxford, the source of most of 
the nation's intellectual life. The old scholastic learning, 
like the old poetic conventions of the French, was worn 
threadbare; yet, while the old curriculum handed down 
from the monastic schools no longer satisfied men's needs, 
the new learning had not yet come. It was one of those 
vacant and depressing intervals when men stand irreso- 
lute — 

"Between two worlds, one dead, 
The other powerless to be born. " 

The new vigour which Wyclif had poured into Oxford 
had been stifled, and for one hundred years after the death 
of the great innovator, Oxford remained sunk in an intel- 
lectual torpor. The Bible was no longer regularly studied 
there. She produced no great and original thinkers, and 
by 1438 the decrease in the number of her students had 
become a matter of public concern. We have associated 
this decline of learning with the suppression of free thought, 
but it was also due in part to the condition of the country, 
unsettled by the frequent political disturbances that char- 
acterised this time. What with foreign war and civil dis- 
sensions, from the beginning of the century to the accession 
of Henry VII . in 1485, England was hardly ever at rest. The 



174 THE BEGIXVIXG DP TEE ?J3"aI3£aVCZ. 

x xxxxt. :: "if :::~" by Henry IV L: : rxxxzx: 3 xxg 
xxxxxi :: e'xl= x. it: train xx: :xe rxxx sxxixit ::t 
royal authority folio" e :1 a z : th e : xx: ii ~ f : e xx. ttii : xx x 
and bloody period of the civil wars Q455-1485). War is not 
necessarily disxxxxetexe xx :: literature :: xxaye~er x x:. 
incentive t: literary treixxi::: T: wards the exi :: the 
sixteenth century Sxaxeexeare made txx trttax-ixg :xxi 
strife between York axe Laxeaete: xx xiax: tieexee ::' hi; 
great series of English hisxexxal im ; lex — hilr the 
VTar= :: the E:ee~ xaetexee xx em :■: the ZEiidle Aex 
England by the destruction of the powerful nobles, 1 
total effect of the foreign and domestic eoivxxe :: : 
period was unfavourable to the proxree - : : lea: rxx z a z i . 
erature. To a great extent, men became depraved a 
brutalised by this continual bloodshed ; and the f actio] 
quarrels in which no great principle was at stake inczeas 
the demoralisation of the nation and tended to destroy 
debase its ideals. Hie great- : learning wi 

drawn into the vortex :: xxxxal aeeixsexxe In He: 
VI s reign, Humphrey Z tier :■: jlexeeste: ~ he thcxx: 
wily and selfish politizi ax ~i- the zijst ::: xxixex"; . iv: 
of Italian culture. ~ *a> ;::e ; :Ti :':: Exdi Treasex xi x 
a few days later. The death of Lord Kivers, the hrotli 
in4aw of King Edward IV ~xe ax e~ex greater less 
learning. This accomplished and cultured gentleman, 1 
friend and patron of Caxton, and the translator of the fi 
book printed in England. wa= exezxted x l-d-l li i : 
in the prime of an honourable and useful life, a victim 
the ambition of Richard EH. But of all these noble a 
unfortunate patrons of learning the scholarly and infamc 
John Ttptoft E.-xx dp ~": e .:i-eie. 142S?-147( ex' 
bly the most typical. Tiptoft visited Jerusalem and studi 
.::. Italy xnder Guarino c: :ex:: e xx x teacxe: :: 
ie~ iraxxirx E: lead e zexxixe interest ir x..ex 



SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES. 175 

he made before the Pope. He presented valuable manu- 
scripts, which he had brought from the Continent, to the 
University of Oxford. He translated several of the Latin 
classics into English, and he was beyond doubt one of the 
greatest pioneers of the new culture in England. Intel- 
lectually eminent, he was also morally depraved, a combina- 
tion often found in the Italian patrons of art and learning 
at this time. His great abilities were largely given to 
politics, and he was executed for political reasons in 1470. 
Tiptoft represents in his life and character the conflicting 
tendencies, the good and evil of his contradictory time; 
his death is another illustration of the way in which the 
factional quarrels of the period obstructed the advance of 
English scholarship. "What great loss it was," wrote Ful- 
ler, "of the noble, virtuous, and well-disposed lord, the 
Earl of Worcester! The axe did then at one blow cut off 
more learning than was in the heads of all the surviving 
nobility." 

We may then conclude that the progress of the "new 
learning" in England was somewhat retarded by the pe- 
culiar conditions of the time. In the four- 
Son ?or Para " teentn century the influence of Italian culture 
the "new is apparent in the later works of Chaucer, and 
in^nffiand ^ ne s P ir1 ^ °f the Reformation was anticipated by 
Wyclif ; but these men were far ahead of their 
time, and it was not until towards the end of the fifteenth 
century, when the long struggle for the crown had been 
ended by the accession of Henry VII., that the Italian in- 
fluence began again vitally to affect England, and a great 
religious teacher arose again at Oxford in John Colet. 

But even before this there were many indications that, 
in spite of adverse conditions, a change was at hand. Al- 
though the old educational methods were still followed, 
and although the study of Greek was not introduced 
until the last quarter of the century, the material equip- 



176 THE BEGINNING OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

ment for education was steadily increased. Three univer- 
sities arose in Scotland between 1410 and 1494. Three 
colleges and a Divinity school were founded at Oxford 
between 1429 and 1458, and four colleges were founded 
at Cambridge between 1437 and 1473. In 1440 the 
gentle and unfortunate Henry VI. established the great 
school at Eton known as Eton College. All this provision 
for education was rather a continuation of the work of the 
preceding century than the direct result of any fresh stim- 
ulus from Italy; yet it helped to prepare the way for the 
revival of letters. From the early years of the century 
there are signs that this revival was at hand. Humphrey, 
Duke of Gloucester, the patron of Occleve and other men of 
letters, encouraged learning and the study of the Latin 
classics, much as rich and powerful men were doing in Italy; 
and as early as 1418, Cardinal Beaufort induced Poggio 
Bracciolini, a distinguished Florentine scholar, to visit 
England. During the middle years of the century ambi- 
tious students began to repair to Italy from the English 
Universities, especially from Oxford, to pursue their studies 
at Ferrara, Florence, or Bologna. After their return to 
England several of these men rose to high positions in the 
Church; they brought back collections of books, which 
often went to enrich the college libraries: and more than 
this, they brought back something of the spirit of Italian 
scholarship. Thus, through many channels, the New 
Learning was slowly beginning to irrigate English soil. 

Meanwhile, in the troubled reign of Edward IV. (1461- 
1483), the new invention of printing books from movable 
type was brought into England. William Caxtox (1422- 
1491), who had learned this wonderful art of printing in 
the Low Countries, returned to England in 1470 and set 
up his press in a house near Westminster Abbey, " at the 
sign of the Red Pale.'' Here he published the Dictes and 
Sayings of the Philosophers (1477), translated from the 



THE OXFORD REFORMERS. 177 

French by Lord Rivers, the first book printed in England. 
Caxton was no mere tradesman; he had a genuine love 
for literature. His press gave England the best he knew 
— Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Gower's Confessio Amantis, 
Malory's Morte d' Arthur, and an English translation of 
Vergil's Mneid. He was himself an industrious trans- 
lator, and the prefaces which he wrote for a number of 
his publications are clearly and simply written. He won 
the favour of the great ; " many noble and divers gentle- 
men" discussed literary matters with him in his humble 
workshop; even kings took an interest in his work. King 
Edward died, and Caxton's sometime patron, Richard 
of Gloucester, usurped the throne; but while England 
was torn by the strife of factions, the old printer worked 
on with a steady industry, lamenting at times in his pre- 
faces some scholarly patron cut off by the violence of 
the times. 

Having spoken of the preparatory stage of the "new 
learning" in England, we must now turn to its definite 

establishment by a remarkable group of scholars 
Sfomws .'^ known as the Oxford Reformers. The leaders of 

this little group were William Grocyn (1440?- 
1519), Thomas Linacre (cir. 1460-1524), John Colet 
(1467 ?-l 519?), the great Dutch scholar Desiderius Eras- 
mus (1467-1536), and Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). In 
1491 Grocyn returned from Italy, where he had studied 
under two of the greatest classical scholars of the day, and 
inaugurated the regular public instruction in Greek at Ox- 
ford. He was soon joined by his friend and fellow-student 
Linacre, a learned physician, then fresh from his studies 
in Italy, and the two worked together at Oxford, teaching 
the language which had become the badge of the new 
learning. Among Linacre's pupils was Thomas More, 
then an attractive and quick-witted youth who already 
seemed likely "to prove a marvellous man." By 1497, 






ITS THE BEGINNING OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

Oxford had acquired such a reputation as a school fa 
the classics that Erasmus, too poor to go to Italy, cam 
to England instead, to study under Groeyn and Lin; 
And Erasmus found Oxford, lately inert and uninsphi 
sc foil of "polish and learning''' that he hardly regret 
his change of plan. "When I listen to my friend Dole 
he wrote, "it seems like listening to Plato himself. V, 
does not wonder at the wide range of Grocyn's kno 
edge? What can be more searching, deep, and rear 
than the judgment of Li nacre? When did nature moi 
a temper more endearing and happy than the temper 
Thomas More?" Under these men and their associa 
Oxford became the first centre of the new learning 
England. Cambridge soon joined in the educational 
revival; in Henry YIIL's reign, the influence of the Italian 
culture reached the Court, and finally became a part of 
Humanism ^he nation's life. One trait of these Oxford 
in England reformers can hardly fail to impress os; they 
and Italy. were men Q | j^^y character, and their work 

bears the stamp of a deeply serious and often distinctly 
religious spirit. The scepticism, the levity, the worship 

of beauty, the riot of sensuality, which were then degrad- 
ing Italy, had no place in the lives or the books of these 
English scholars. Almost from the first the tone of the 
new learning in England was spiritualised by the inher- 
ently moral and religious temper of the English character 
The knowledge of Greek which Colet gained in semi- 
pagan Italy he applied to the study of the New Testament, 
and his first work after his return to Oxford was to infuse 
new life into the interpretation of the Bible by a course 
of lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul. He boldly at- 
tacked the covetousness and self-seeking then prevalent 
in the Church; and, quiet scholar as he was. he dared to 
stand up before an assembh r of the greatest prelates of 
England ana rebuke :nrua for their corrupt and worldly 



ENGLISH AND ITALIAN HUMANISTS. 179 

lives. He devoted a considerable part of his fortune to 
the establishment of the free Grammar School of St. Paul 
in London (1510-12); and in this school (although great 
attention was given to the classics), the image of the child 
Christ was set up above the Head Master's desk, with 
the inscription, "Hear ye Him." Both Erasmus and 
More were at heart profoundly serious, having indeed 
caught much of Colet's spirit. Under the keen satire of 
the one and the playful wit of the other was the reformer's 
earnestness of purpose. More jested with his execu- 
tioner on the steps of the scaffold, but he willingly died 
for his faith. Like Colet and Erasmus, More was keenly 
alive to the existing imperfections in both Church and 
State. In his account of the imaginary commonwealth 
of Utopia (1516), he set before Europe a picture of an 
ideal state, — a picture which suggests in almost every 
detail the shortcomings and evils of the reality. The 
social changes which More thus indirectly advocated 
were both radical and comprehensive, for in almost every- 
thing More's Utopia is the precise opposite of More's 
England. In this dream of the future, the old ideals 
of the Middle Ages find no place; but that modern spirit, 
which had already manifested itself in Wyclif and Lang- 
land, reappears — if in a different aspect — in More's vision 
of a new earth. 

The difference between these English humanists (as the 
disciples of the new learning were called) and many of their 
Italian contemporaries is more than personal, it is national 
also. It helps us to understand why the Renaissance in 
England was a different thing from the Renaissance in 
Italy. While Englishmen did not remain altogether un- 
touched by the lower influences in Renaissance Italy, 
England on the whole was proof against them. The 
Renaissance in England produced no Raphael, no Michael 
Angelo; but it produced no Borgia or no Machiavelli. 



180 THE BEGINNING OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

The Renaissance in Italy, which embodied in colour and 
stone a love of beauty, produced no such mighty intellect 
as that of Bacon, it produced no Shakespeare. The 
attraction of Italy for the English is the attraction of 
opposites. The profound racial differences between the 
Teuton of the North and the Latin of the South, modified 
or transfused the influences of Italy, and made the Teu- 
tonic Renaissance not merely a revival of letters but a 
religious reformation. 

W nile the touch of Greek beauty and philosophy, 
restored and immortal after their burial of a thousand 
The discov- vears > was ^ nus reanimating Europe, the hori- 
ery of the zon of the world was suddenly enlarged by a 
ew or ' series of great discoveries. In 1486 Diaz dis- 
covered the Cape of Good Hope; in 1492 Columbus pene- 
trated the sea of darkness and gave to civilisation a New 
World; in 1498 Vasco da Gama rounded Africa and made 
a new path to India. England shared in this fever of 
exploration; and in 1497 the Cabots, sent by Henry VII. 
"to subdue" land unknown to all Christians," saw the 
mainland of America. We can hardly overestimate the 
impetus given to the mental life of Europe by such a 
sudden rush of new ideas. The opportunities for life and 
action were multiplying: man's familiar earth was expand- 
ing on every side. The air was charged with wonder and 
romance; the imagination of explorers was alive with the 
dreams of a poet; and cities shining with gold, or fountains 
of perpetual youth, were sought for in. the excitement of 
sensation which made the impossible seem a thing of 
every day. 

In the midst of all the new activity, Copernicus (cir. 

1540) put forth his theory that, instead of being the centre 

of the universe, round which the whole heavens 

p ' revolved, the solid earth was but a satellite in 

motion round the central sun. While this conception, so 



SUMMARY. 181 

startling to men's most fundamental notions, was slow to 
gain general acceptance, it was another element of wonder 
and of change. 

The Church was quickened by the currents of this new 
life. Men chafed at its corrupt wealth and narrow 

mediaeval views. The Bible was translated 
mation. 0r " an< ^ made "the book of the people. Luther, the 

type of the unfettered, individual conscience, 
faced Pope and Cardinal with his "Here I stand, Martin 
Luther; I cannot do otherwise: God help me." This 
mighty upheaval shook England as well as Germany. The 
year 1526 saw the introduction of Tyndale's translation 
of the Bible, and eight years later the policy of Henry VIII. 
withdrew the Church in England from the headship of the 
Pope. 

Thus England came to share in the diverse activities 
of the Renaissance, intellectual, maritime, and religious; 

in the revival of learning, the discovery of the 

world, and the Reformation. In the fifteenth 
century she had absorbed and stored up many vital in- 
fluences; early in the sixteenth century these slowly ac- 
cumulated forces, these new emotions and ideas, began to 
find an outlet in the work of a new class of writers, and we 
reach the threshold of the Elizabethan Era, the time when 
the Renaissance found utterance in English literature. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ENTRANCE OF THE NEW LEARNING INTO 
LITERATURE. 

(Cir. 1509-1579.) 

With the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1547), we entei 
upon a new stage in the progress of the English Renais- 
sance. Dining this period educational reform spreads 
from the Universities to the grammar schools, while the 
influence of Italian art and culture affects many of the 
great nobles and becomes apparent at Court. 
hu^at Court. England is beginning, in a somewhat halting and 
experimental fashion, to use the new material 
she has received. The New Learning, having passed be- 
yond merely academic limits, is beginning to be converted 
into a new literature. 

The new scholarship had naturally started at the Uni- 
versities; the new literature naturally began at the Court. 
In spite of those faults which later assumed sueh terrible 
proportions, the young Henry VIII. was well qualified to 
be the patron of art and learning. He was enormously 
wealthy, open-handed, high-spirited, and remarkable for 
his frank bearing, manly beauty, and varied accomplish- 
ments. He was probably the most learned and cultured 
prince in Europe: he encountered Luther in controversy, 
and he wrote songs, composing both words and music. 
He was a lavish patron of art. He had that love of mag- 
nificence, that delight in luxury, beauty, and colour, so 
characteristic of the men of the Italian Renaissance. 
Brutal egoist and tyrant as he was at heart, Henry's in- 

182 



WYATT AND SURREY. 183 

tellectual sympathies, his love of art, his fondness for 
gorgeous masques and pageants, combined to promote the 
new culture. Erasmus went so far as to complain that 
the love of learning had left the clergy and "gone from 
them to the secular princes, the court and the nobility." 
Some of the courtiers made verses which were circulated 
in manuscript among their friends. The chief among 
these "Courtly makers," as an old writer calls them, 
were Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), and his poetical 

disciple Hexry Howard, Earl of Surrey 
wyatt and ( 1517 ?_ 1 5 47 ) > Without great poetic genius, 

these two courtiers made an epoch in literary 
history. Indeed, their influence upon the course of Eng- 
lish poetry seems out of proportion to their abilities or 
to the intrinsic merit of their work. Wyatt and Surrey 
were men of cultivated taste. They read the Latin 
classics, they were imbued with a love of Italian poetry, 
especially of the sonnets of Petrarch, and a large part 
of their work consists of translations or imitations 
of foreign models. But, while they did not originate 
a new order of poetry, they were the first to intro- 
duce new verse-forms and a new style of poetry into Eng- 
land. Italian scholarship entered England through Grocyn 
and his colleagues, Italian poetry through Wyatt and 
Surrey. In this important work, Wyatt, who was about 
fifteen years older than Surrey, was the leader. Wyatt, 
like Chaucer, was at one time esquire to the King. When 
about twenty-three he travelled in Italy, and was after- 
wards sent on several diplomatic missions. He intro- 
duced the sonnet into England, and he is said to have been 
the first English writer of "polished satire." He often 
shows an imperfect mastery of metre; but he has left a few 
lyrics which are a worthy prelude to the great chorus of 
Elizabethan song. Surrey carried forward the work which 
Wyatt had begun. His versification is smoother than 



184 THE NEW LEARNING IN LITERATURE. 

that of his master , his touch is more assured. He wrote 
sonnets in the Petrarchian manner, made translations 
from several Latin poets, and above all, in his translation 
of a part of Vergil's Mneid he introduced blank verse into 
England. The benefit of these innovations to later Eng- 
lish poetry is as striking as it is obvious. The sonnet is one 
of the recognised glories of English poetry, while blank verse, 
used in the first English tragedy, improved and developed 
by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton, is the metre of our 
greatest dramas and our greatest epic. The publication, in 
1557, of the Songs and Sonnets of Wyatt, Surrey, and other 
authors in a work commonly known as Totters Miscellany 
(the forerunner of many similar anthologies), introduced 
this new poetry to a wider audience. Surrey perished at 
thirty, a victim to the tyranny of Henry VIII. : his work 
was but begun, and, for some time after his death the 
poetical reforms which he and Wyatt had inaugurated 
made no apparent progress. Indeed, from the publication 
of Totters Miscellany to the appearance of Spenser's Shep- 
herd's Calendar, twenty-two years later, the progress of 
English literature was slow, difficult, and uncertain. The 
two really notable poets between Surrey and Spenser are 
Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (1536-1608), and 
George Gascoigne (1536?-1577). With Sackville, as with 
s kviii Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Raleigh, and many other 
aristocratic authors of their century, literature 
was but one among many varied duties and pursuits. By 
birth, wealth, and personal abilities, Sackville was well 
fitted to take an active part in court life and public 
affairs. He enjoyed the favour both of Elizabeth and 
James I., and he led the active life of a successful 
diplomatist, courtier, and man of affairs. He succeeded 
Burleigh as Lord High Treasurer, and he died sitting 
at the Council Board. But, if circumstances made 
Sackville a statesman, Nature made him a poet. As a 



SACKVILLE. 185 

young man he was one of the contributors to The 
Mirror for Magistrates, a lengthy poem by various 
authors. This work was designed to be a mirror in 
which magistrates, or those that are great in this world, 
could see by the example of others how "unstable" is 
"worldly prosperity' 7 and with "what grievous plagues" 
the vices of great princes are punished. Its purpose was 
the same as Lydgate's Fall of the Princes, of which it was 
designed to be a continuation. Sackville's contribution 
to this poem consisted of a general preface, or Induction, 
and the Complaynte of Henry e Duke of Buckingham, in 
which the shade of that nobleman appears and tells the 
story of his fall. In the Induction we are told how the 
poet, meeting with Sorrow, is led by her into the region of 
the shades that he may see the spirits of the fallen princes 
and hear them tell their own stories. This seems but 
the repetition of an old theme ; the thought, the verse, the 
imagery, all seem taken from the past; but Sackville has 
vitalised these old thoughts and images by his fresh 
creative power and made them a new thing. The sombre 
tone which pervades the noble Induction, gives it an 
impressive and artistic unity. The melancholy mood of 
the poet, the forlorn and dreary aspect of nature, the 
bitter cold, the gathering darkness, conduce, as in certain 
stories of Poe, to produce an harmonious effect. In the 
midst of this gloom and decay, appear the allegorical 
figures of Sorrow, Old Age, and the rest, presented with a 
remarkable vividness and force. It is safe to say that 
no English poet, from the death of Chaucer to the advent 
of Spenser, equalled Sackville in elevation, dignity, and 
force. Sackville was rather the precursor of a new poetry 
than the follower of the old; and his continuation of Lyd- 
gate's Fall of the Princes, is in reality the precursor of 
Spenser's Faerie Queene. 

In the period of uncertainty and experiment which im- 



186 THE NEW LEARNING IN LITERATURE. 

mediately preceded the great age of Elizabethan litera- 
ture, George Gascoigne is a typical and impor- 
tant figure. It was a time of transition. The 
language was changing, and its vocabulary was being 
rapidly enlarged. The laws of English prosody were still 
unsettled; the possibilities of the sonnet and other novel 
verse-forms had yet to be explored. The world of medi- 
aeval poetry had been overthrown, and men were trying in 
some confusion to set up a new world in its stead. Gas- 
coigne, a man of restless energy and adventurous life, 
holds a foremost place among the literary experimenters 
of this time. He was versatile and clever, a ready writer, 
and a shrewd critic of his time. He wrote the first prose- 
comedy in English (The Supposes, 1566, a translation of 
Ariosto's Gli Suppositi) ; he was part-author of one of the 
earliest English tragedies [Jocasia, 1566, modelled upon an 
Italian adaptation of Euripides) ; he composed lyrics, tried 
his hand at blank verse, and was in many directions the 
pioneer of the. coming age. Probably his best known work 
is The Steel Glass (1576), a satirical poem on the evils and 
follies of the time, in which he pictures the ideal state 
somewhat as More had done in his Utopia. 

While poetry was thus preparing the way for new tri- 
umphs, English prose was steadily gaining in variety and 
The ffrowth * n ^ erar 3' importance. In this advance, how- 
of English ever, English had to contend against the time- 
prose, honoured prestige of Latin, and Latin was still 
a formidable rival. Even Roger Ascham (1515-1568), al- 
though he wrote in English, lamented the inferiority of his 
native tongue to Greek and Latin. He thought that it was 
more creditable to an author to write in Latin, and de- 
clared that in English everything was done " in a manner 
so meanly, both for the matter and handling, that no man 
could do worse. " * Nevertheless, changing conditions were 

1 Toxophilus, the schole of Shoot inge (1544). 



ENGLISH PROSE. 187 

making the triumph of the national language inevitable. 
Learning was no longer shut up in cloisters, and Ascham, 
mindful of the need of "the many," wrote "in the English 
tongue for Englishmen/ ' and addressed his first book "To 
all Gentlemen and Yeomen of England." 1 We can gain 
some notion of the progress of English prose from the ac- 
cession of Henry VIII. to the middle years of Elizabeth's 
reign by enumerating a few of the representative books 
and authors of that time. Much was done in the field of 
history to increase the Englishman's knowledge and appre- 
ciation of England and her past. Sir Thomas More's His- 
tory of King Richard the Third (1513?) is a landmark in the 
history of English historical prose. It is not a great book, 
like the Utopia, but the story is told simply, clearly, and 
almost without comment. The historians, on the whole, 
found it difficult to emancipate themselves from monastic 
and mediaeval methods, and the ponderous Chronicles pro- 
duced at this time, are quaint, laborious, and respectable, 
rather than brilliant or profound. Fabyan's Chronicle 
(Concordana of Histories, printed in 1515) is a general sur- 
vey of the nation's history; Hall's Chronicle, which was 
completed by Grafton (1548), treats of the period of the 
Wars of the Roses; while the important Chronicle of 
Holinshed and his co-workers (1577), furnished Shakes- 
peare with the material for some of his greatest plays. 

The labours of John Leland (cir. 1506-1552), " the father 
of English antiquaries, " are a further proof of the interest 
then excited by the nation's past. George Cavendish (d. 
cir. 1562) wrote a life of his master, Cardinal Wolsey, 
which is said to be "the first separate biography in the 
English tongue, "while TheBoke Named the Governour (1531) 
of Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) is "the earliest English 
treatise on moral philosophy." Froissart was translated 
into English by Lord Berners (1523), and More's Utopia by 
1 Toxophilus, the schole of Shootinge (1544). 



188 THE NEW LEARNING IN LITERATURE. 

Ralph Robinson (1551). Roger Ascham, at one time tutor 
to Elizabeth, and one of the most eminent representa- 
tives of the new learning in England, wrote his Toxo- 
philus (1544) in praise of archery. Ascham writes in an 
agreeable, discursive style, relieving his instructions on the 
use of the bow with allusions to Plato and the classics and 
with reflections on the problems of education. Ascham 
explained his theory of education in The Schoolmaster (1570) . 
His chief argument in this book is "that young children 
should rather be allured to learning by gentleness and love, 
than compelled to learning by beating and fear." x The 
sermons of Ascham's contemporary Hugh Latimer (1485?- 
1555), the sturdy reformer, who was burnt at the stake, 
are notable for their plain, vigorous, idiomatic English. 
The son of a yeoman, Latimer was a man of the people, as 
well as a scholar. Although he came "to stand before 
kings," he spoke with earnestness, courage, and simplicity, 
enforcing his teachings with homely and amusing stories, 
often drawn from his own experience. It was in this pe- 
riod that English took the place of Latin in the services of 
the Church. The first complete English Prayer Book, com- 
piled and arranged by Cranmer and his assistants from the 
old Latin Service Books, was authorised and published in 
1549. Before this (1525), the New Testament had been 
translated into English by William Tyndale, and before the 
close of the century several translations of the entire Bible 
had appeared. The English Bible not only influenced the 
course of history; it did much, as has already been said, to 
shape and settle the standards of English prose. 

But the more distinctly aesthetic features of this period 
should not be left unnoticed. These years of growth 
rk * ec * England to Spenser, Shakespeare, and 
of the Bacon, as well as to Milton, Bunyan, and 

translators. o omwe ll; f or "every breeze was dusty with the 
golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy." 2 The sermons 
choolmaster, Bk. i. 2 Lowell's Essay on Spenser. 



STUDY OF THE CLASSICS. 189 

and death of Latimer, the English Prayer Book and Bible, 
suggest the presence of those moral and religious elements 
in the English Renaissance which gave it a peculiar seri- 
ousness, vitality, and elevation: the numerous translations 
from Latin, Greek, and Italian, which date from about the 
beginning of Elizabeth's reign, bear witness to the grow- 
ing influence of Italy, and the progress of the movement 
in the sphere of taste, beauty, and passion. By these 
translations, the spirit of the new culture, which had 
already spread from the scholars to the nobility and the 
Court, was extended in ever widening circles to the people 
and became a living part of the nation's literature. Not 
only did the learned Lady Jane Grey linger "with much 
delight" over the Greek of Plato, while the others took 
their sport in the Park, not only did the Princess Eliza- 
beth herself begin the day by reading the Greek Testa- 
ment and the tragedies of Sophocles, the translators 
also did their part. It was for them to give the new 
thought a wider currency, and to make the great classics 
the common quarry for all who could read the English 
tongue. 

During the latter half of the sixteenth and early part 
of the seventeenth centuries, Vergil's Mneid, Ovid's 
Metamorphoses, numbers of Seneca's plays, and Llomer, 
in the famous translation of Chapman, were thus made 
English literature. The Elizabethan writers delighted 
in a somewhat ostentatious display of this newly acquired 
learning, and their works are often filled with classic allu- 
sions which we should now consider commonplace. But 
as a quickening power their effect was incalculable. Shakes- 
peare's use of Sir Thomas North's translation of Plu- 
tarch's Lives admirably illustrates the way in which the 
translator supplied material for the author. Out of 
North's version Shakespeare built his Julius Ccesar, Cori- 
olanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and, to some extent, Timon 



190 THE NEW LEARNING IN LITERATURE. 

of Athens. The literature of Italy was likewise thrown 
open to the English reader. Harrington translated Ari- 
osto's Orlando Furioso (1591), Fairfax translated Tasso's 
Jerusalem Delivered (1600), while hundreds of Italian 
stories were for sale in the London bookstalls clustered 
about old St. Paul's. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE CULMINATION OF THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE. 

(From the Advent of Spenser, 1579, to the Death of 
Ben Jonson, 1637.) 

The great age of Elizabethan literature, one of the most 
illustrious in human history, began with startling abrupt- 
ness. For nearly two hundred years, from the death of 
Chaucer to the appearance of Spenser, the culture of 
Italy had been slowly forcing its way in England, — in- 
terrupted or retarded in its progress by many obstacles. 
During this long preparatory period of education, growth, 
and experiment, England had received much, but pro- 
duced little. Suddenly, with the advent of Spenser, 
the earliest of the great Elizabethan writers, we pass into 
a period of the most lavish and amazing creative energy. 
The lean years, in which England could hardly produce 
a poet, are followed by a period of plenty; a period marked 
by a superb vitality, crowded with great works and great 
men. This period of performance, following as it does 
after two centuries of promise, extends to about the time 
of Ben Jonson's death in 1637, or for some sixty years. 
Indeed, the greatest work of this extraordinary epoch 
can be found, with a few exceptions, within an even 
shorter space. Broadly speaking, the literature which 
we commonly call Elizabethan, was the work of a single 
generation. Many of the foremost of the Elizabethan 
writers were born within a few years of each other; while 
Ben Jonson, the last of the Elizabethans, was only some 
twenty years younger than Spenser, who may be styled 
the first. This means that the great age of Elizabethan 

191 



192 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

literature began with the almost simultaneous appear- 
ance of a number of remarkable men, and that with the 
passing of these men it came to an end. Compared with 
the length of the preparatory period, this literary culmi- 
nation of the English Renaissance seems almost as brief 
as it is brilliant. 

We cannot hope to account for such an epoch with 
scientific exactness. Such a sudden and impressive mani- 
festation of latent power was probably the result of a 
fortunate conjunction of many causes, some of which are 
unknown or but imperfectly understood. A partial ex- 
planation, however, is to be found in the social, political, and 
educational conditions of the time. In Elizabeth's reign, 
and especially during the latter half, there was much to 
stimulate genius and encourage literary production. 

In the two preceding reigns much of the national force 
had been spent in religious controversies. Edward VI. 
Freedom from (1547-1553) had forced Protestantism upon a 
religious nation not, as a whole, fully prepared to accept 
persecution. ^ Mary (15 53_ 1558)j with a re li g i ous zea l as 

pathetic as, in our eyes, it was cruel and mistaken, 
had striven to persecute the people back into Roman 
Catholicism. In Elizabeth's reign we pass out of the 
bitterness and confusion of this warfare of religions 
into a period of comparative quiet. The religious and 
political difficulties which beset Elizabeth, on her accession 
in 1558, slowly sank out of sight under her firm and mod- 
erate rule. Patience and toleration did much to soften 
the violence of the religious parties; the fierce fires of mar- 
tyrdom which had lit up the terrible reign of Mary, were 
cold, and the nation, relieved from pressing anxieties, 
was comparatively free to turn to other issues. The very 
year in which Shakespeare is supposed to have come up 
to London to seek his fortune (1587) saw the final re- 
moval of a threatened danger by the execution of Mary 



ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND. 193 

Queen of Scots, while the year following England struck 
down the haughty menace of the Spaniard by her de- 
feat of the Armada. 

But the reign was more than a period of relief from past 
struggles or persecution; it was marked by a rapid advance 
Prosperity m national prosperity and by a widespread in- 
of the crease in the comforts and luxuries of life. 

peop e. Among the people there were many causes of 

contentment. Improved methods of farming doubled the 
yield per acre; the domestic manufacture of wool greatly 
increased, and homespun came into favour. In many 
little ways, by the introduction of chimneys, of feather 
beds, pillows, and the more general use of glass, the con- 
veniences of living were greatly increased. The sea, as 
well as the land, yielded a large revenue. Not only did 
the English fishing-boats crowd the Channel, but hardy 
sailors brought back cod from the Newfoundland banks, 
or tracked the whale in the vast solitudes of the polar 
seas. 

England was laying the foundations of her future com- 
mercial and maritime supremacy. Her trade increased 

with Flanders and with the ports of the Medi- 
Commerce. terranean, and her merchant ships pushed to 

Scandinavia, Archangel, and Guinea. In 1566 
Sir Thomas Gresham built the Royal Exchange in Lon- 
don, a hall in which the merchants met as the Venetians 
in their Rialto. Toward the end of the sixteenth century 
the famous East India Company was established. The 
The exten- progress of popular education under the com- 
sion of bined stimulus of the Revival of Learning 

and the Reformation exercised an obvious and 
important influence upon the literature of Elizabeth's 
time. The dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. 
(1535-39) had put an end to the monastic schools, 
which with a few exceptions had been antagonistic 



194 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

to the new learning. This was followed by a rapid 
increase in the number of free granimar schools, and 
through them, widely distributed as they were throughout 
the country, some tincture of the new classical learning 
spread to the middle classes. Green says that the gram- 
mar schools founded in the reigns of Edward VI. and of 
Elizabeth constituted " a system of middle-class education 
which by the close of the century had changed the very 
face of England." 1 With this spread of the new classical 
learning, we naturally connect a notable change in the 
literary conditions of the time. Before the great literary 
outburst in Elizabeth's reign, the literature of England had 
been almost entirely written by ecclesiastics or by men of 
the aristocratic class. The people of course had their rude, 
religious plays, their songs, ballads, and folk-lore ; but apart 
from these they had been silent. It is a notable fact that 
in the great literary era of Elizabeth's reign the middle and 
lower-middle classes are represented for the first time in 
the history o£ England. Spenser, for instance, was the son 
of a cloth- weaver; Shakespeare, of a provincial dealer in 
hides and wool; Marlowe, of a shoemaker. All these, and 
many others, came from a class which hitherto had almost 
no part or place in the making of the representative lit- 
erature of the nation; and all these men, like many of their 
followers, began their education at one or the other of the 
free grammar schools. Before the coming of Spenser, all 
the principal English poets of the century belonged to the 
noble or upper class. Wyatt and Surrey were noblemen 
and corn-tiers; Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and Earl of 
Dorset, was Lord High Treasurer of England ; Turberville, 
the translator of Ovid, belonged to an old and distin- 
guished family in Dorsetshire; Gascoigne was the de- 
scendant of a Chief Justice. But after Spenser, while 
there are still noble and aristocratic authors, such as 

1 History of the English People, ii. 86. 



SOCIAL LIFE. 195 

Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Bacon, and Sir Walter Raleigh ; 
there are also the sons of the people, of the traders 
and cobblers and weavers; new men who have come 
up from the grammar schools or universities charged 
with new ideas. This is the rise of the people in the 
Kingdom of Letters; the appearance of the "third estate." 
And it is to these men of the "third estate" that the glory 
of Elizabethan literature is largely due ; it is almost wholly 
to them that we owe the Elizabethan drama. While the 
sudden appearance of this new class of writers was by no 
means the only cause of the sudden greatness of Eliza- 
bethan literature, we can hardly doubt that it contributed 
to this result. 

With the ease and wealth that sprang from this in- 
creasing prosperity came that delight in beauty, that half- 
pagan pleasure in the splendid adornments of 
dou/of^fe. ^ e > wmcn characterise the Italian Renaissance. 
Life, no longer shut within the heavy masonry of 
the feudal castle, ran glittering in the open sunshine. 
Stately villas were built, with long gable roofs, grotesque 
carvings, and shining oriels, and surrounded with the 
pleached walks and the terraces, the statuary and the 
fountains, of an Italian garden. 

The passion for colour showed itself among the wealthier 
classes in a lavish magnificence and eccentricity of cos- 
tume. The young dandy went "perfumed like 
a milliner," 1 and often affected the fashions of 
Italy as the Anglo-maniac of our own day apes those of 
England. In its luxury of delight in life and colour, the 
nation bedecked itself 

"With silken coats, and caps, and golden rings, 
With ruffs, and cuffs, and farthingales, and things; 
With scarfs and fans, and double change of bravery, 
With amber bracelets, beads, and all this knavery. " a 

1 King Henry IV., Act i. Sc. 3. 

2 Taming of the Shrew, Act iv. Sc. 3. 






196 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

Moralists and Puritans bitterly denounced the extrava- 
gance and absurdities of the rapidly changing fashions. 
"Except it were a dog in a doublet," writes an author of 
the time, '"you shall not see any so disguised as are my 
countrymen of England.'* x But ridicule and reproof were 
alike powerless to check the nation's holiday mood. Men 
put off their more sober garments to rustle in silks and 
satins, to sparkle with jewels: they were gorgeous in laces 
and velvets: they glittered with chains and brooches of 
gold: they gladly suffered themselves to be tormented by 
huge ruffs, stiff with the newly discovered vanity of starch. 

Shakespeare, whom we cannot imagine over-precise, is 
fond of showing such fashionable vanities in an unfavour- 
able light, and from more than one passage we may suppose 
him to have felt an intense, country-bred dislike for painted 
faces and false hair. On the other hand, when we read his 
famous description of Cleopatra hi her barge, we appreciate 
how all this glow of colour appealed to and satisfied the im- 
agination of the time. 2 The same spirit showed itself in 
the costly banquets: in the showy pageants or street pro- 
cessions, with their elaborate scenery and allegorical char- 
acters: in the revels like those with which Queen Elizabeth 
was received at Kenilworth ',1575); in the spectacular en- 
tertainment of the mask, a performance in which poet, 
musician, and — as we should say — the stage manager. 
worked together to delight mind. eye. and ear. Milton 
has this splendour in mind when he writes: 

''There let Hymen, oft appear 
In saffron robe, with taper clear, 
And pomp, and feast, and revelry, 
With mask and antique pageantry, 
Such sights as youthful poets dream 
On summer eves by haunted stream." 3 

1 Harrison's Elizabethan England, Camelot Series, p. 108. 

2 Antony and Cleopatra, Act ii. Sc. 2. 

3 L'AUegro. 



SOCIAL LIFE 19T 

But the Elizabethan passion for dress and ornament is 
but a surface indication of the immense delight in life 
Elizabethan wmcn characterises the time. If we would 
delight appreciate the vital spirit of this crowded and 
bewildering age, we must feel the rush of its 
superb and irrepressible energy, pouring itself out through 
countless channels. England was like a youth first come to 
the full knowledge of his strength, rejoicing as a giant to 
run his course, and . determined to do, to see, to know, 
to enjoy to the full. Shakespeare spoke for his age, when 
he declared that: 

"Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits." 1 

The noble and wealthy sons of England crowded to 
Italy: they "swam in a gondola," 2 they plunged into the 
riotous and luxurious pleasures of Venice. The fever of 
adventure burned in men's veins. "We cannot denie," 
wrote one of Sir Walter Raleigh's companions, "we 
cannot denie that the chiefe commendation of virtue 
consists in action: we truly say that otium is animce vivce 
sepultura." 3 The thrill of this youthful zest in action, 
the allurement and mystery of the yet unconquered 
world, are in Shakespeare's lines: 

"He wondered that your lordship 
Would suffer him to spend his youth at home; 
While other men of slender reputation, 
Put forth their sons to seek preferment out: 
Some, to the wars to try their fortune there ; 
Some to discover islands far away. " 4 

Drake sailed round the world (1577-1580); the tiny 
ships of Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and the rest, parted 

1 Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act. L Sc. 1. 
3 As You Like It, Act iv. Sc. 1 

3 De Guiana Carmen Epicum, quoted by Jusserand, Literary History 
of the English People, vol. ii. part i. p. 275. 
• * Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act i. Sc. 3. 



198 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

the distant waters of unploughed seas. The buccaneers 
plundered and fought with the zest and unwearied vigour 
of the viking. When Sir Walter Raleigh was taken 
prisoner in 1603. he is said to have been decked with four 
thousand pounds' worth of jewels: yet, courtier and fine 
gentleman as he was. he could face peril, hunger, and 
privation, in the untracked solitudes of the New World. 
With an insatiable and many-sided capacity for life typical 
of his time, Raleigh wrote poetry, boarded Spanish gal- 
leons, explored the wilderness, and produced in his old age 
a huge History of the World. In their full confidence of 
power, men carried on vast literary undertakings, like 
Sidney's Arcadia, Drayton's Polyolbion, or Spenser's 
Faerie Queene, the magnitude of which would have daunted 
a less vigorous generation. Nothing wearied, nothing 
fatigued them: like Raleigh they could "toil terribly." 
The young Francis Bacon — lawyer, philosopher, and 
courtier — wrote to Cecil with an inimitable audacity: 
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province." 

The centre of all this full and active life was London. 
It was there that not only all the great dramatists, poets. 
Shakes- anc ^ cour tiers met .- DU * there too came the fam- 
peare's ous travellers after then long and perilous voy- 

London. a g es tQ ta j_ e t j le ^, ease at t j ie ^ r • miSi j^ t } ie |j 

Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street gathered the great men 
of the age. Here Shakespeare, Jonson, Raleigh, and the 
rest drank their Malmsey and Canary, and smoked with 
wonder the newly introduced tobacco, discussing, doubt- 
less, the newest play or poem, or listening eagerly to travel- 
lers' tales of the splendours of Italy or the marvels of the 
New World. 

We must remember that Shakespeare's, like Chaucer's. 
London was a waked town, and that its great gates were 
still used. Just outside of the waU to the north lay open 
fields, dotted occasionally with houses and windmills. 



SHAKESPEARE'S LONDON. 199 

There was Spitalfield, Smithfield or Smoothfield, then a 
grassy plain where tournaments were held, and where, 
under Mary, Protestants had been burned. Much of the 
ground about the city was thus uninhabited. The pop- 
ulation of London at this time is placed at about a 
hundred and fifty thousand people, so that while the city 
was already pushing out into the country in some direc- 
tions, the great bulk of the people could still be accom- 
modated within the walls. 

The streets were narrow and ill-paved, and unhealthy 
from refuse and bad drainage, but they were gay with 
the bright and varied costumes of the people. Along the 
Strand, which stretched beyond the city wall parallel with 
the Thames, stood some of the finest houses of the great 
nobles, — York House, where Bacon was born; Durham 
Place, where Raleigh lived; Somerset House, Baynard's 
Castle, and the Temple, with its gardens. 

The majority of houses were built chiefly of wood, 
although brick and stone were beginning to be used. 
They were turreted, and had many gables and overhang- 
ing upper stories. All the handsome places on the Strand, 
whose beautiful gardens sloped to the Thames, had ter- 
races and steps leading down to the water, and every 
great establishment had its own barge and watermen. 
Indeed, by either night or day the Thames was a beau- 
tiful sight, for the river then ran clear and sparkling, while 
on it floated snowy swans, and brightly trimmed boats, 
filled with a gay company, skimmed over its surface. 

The same old London Bridge, which we noted in 
Chaucer's time, was still standing, but many houses and 
shops had been added to those it then contained. These 
were built with their rear overhanging the water, which 
rushed through the arches beneath them with great 
rapidity. The tower which stood before the drawbridge 
had been elaborately rebuilt by Elizabeth and called None- 



200 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

such House, and on its battlements was now displayed 
a ghastly row of the heads of traitors and criminals. 

But to make our mental picture complete, we must 
repeople these scenes with the rush of life; the nave of St. 
Paul's is filled with gossiping throngs, the Thames with its 
pleasure-seekers, the theatres packed with noisy specta- 
tors. If we can but make all this alive again in our 
imagination, we shall realise that to live in Shakespeare's 
London was to touch at every point all the crowded 
activities of the time. 

And all this young life, with its varied spheres of action, 
was still further quickened by a deep national pride 
in the growing greatness of England, and by a feeling 
of chivalric loyalty to the Queen. Religious 
pride°. na differences gave way before a common bond 
of patriotism. The men that faced "the Great 
Armada" were united by a common hatred of Spain, a 
common devotion to England and to her Queen. The 
destruction of this huge armament removed a great weight 
of apprehension and left men free to turn to other inter- 
ests; it became a moving power in the literature of the 
time. We feel the exultant thrill of this triumph in those 
stirring words in Shakespeare's King John: 

"This England never did, nor never shall, 
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, 
But when it first did help to wound itself. 
Now these her princes are come home again, 
Come the three corners of the world in arms, 
And we shall shock them = Nought shall make us rue, 
If England to itself do rest but true. 

And the centre of this new nationality was the Queen. 
Capricious, vain, and fickle as Elizabeth was, she awak- 
ened a devoted loyalty denied to the gloomy and relent- 
less Mary, or to the timorous and ungainly James. She 

1 King John, Act v. Sc, 7. 




SKETCH MAP OF EJ 



Based on contemporary maps and showing approxin 

the chief str 



effi^% 








BETHAN LONDON 



the sites of the principal theaters, etc., and some of 
id suburbs. 



QUEEN ELIZABETH. 201 

was too parsimonious to be a liberal patron to struggling 
authors, but she had a quick and practical sympathy with 
the new intellectual and literary activities of 
th J Queen ner ^ me - The first regular tragedy was pro- 
duced before her, and her interest helped the 
development of the struggling drama. "The versatility 
and many-sidedness of her mind enabled her to under- 
stand every phase of the intellectual movement about 
her, and to fix by a sort of instinct on its highest repre- 
sentative. " * As we review the achievements of Eliza- 
bethan England we can see that the same magnificent 
energy which made England prosperous at home and tri- 
umphant upon the seas is the motive power 
ary ' back of the greatest creative period of her 
literature. Looking at this great time as a whole, we 
must see England as " a noble and puissant Nation rousing 
herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her in- 
vincible locks — as an eagle mewing her mighty youth 
and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam." 2 
Elizabethan literature is but one outlet for this imperious 
energy ; it is the new feeling for life that creates the drama 
as well as discovers kingdoms far away. 

1 Green's History of the English People, vol. ii. p. 319. 
* Milton's Areopagitica. 



202 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

EDMUND SPENSER. 

(1552-1599.) 

"Here next to Chaucer Spenser lies; to whom 
In genius next he was, as now in tomb." 

Camden's Version of Spenser's Epitaph. 

"Our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think 
a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." 

— Milton's Areopagitica. 

"Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven 
With the moon's beauty, and the moon's soft pace, 
I called him Brother, Englishman, and Friend." 

— Wordsworth's Prelude. 

"The gentle Spenser, Fancy's pleasing son: 
Who, like a copious river, pour'd his song 
O'er all the mazes of enchanted ground." 

— Thomson's Seasons. 

"The love of beauty, however, and not of truth is the moving 
principle of his mind ; and he is guided in his fantastic delineations by 
no rule but by the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination." 

— Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets. 

Many of those diverse elements which went to the 
making of this varied, impetuous, and romantic time, 
found expression in the genius of Spenser, the successor 
to Chaucer, the forerunner of Shakespeare in the imperial 
line of English poets. Spenser began his work at a critical 
moment in the intellectual and spiritual life of England. 
For nearly a century the nation had been stirred by de- 
sires and ideals which were distinct and, to some extent, 
antagonistic. Englishmen had felt the allurement of 
Italy, the spell of that strange magic which seemed to 
the worthy Ascham like "the enchantment of the Circes"; 
and England, like Germany, had passed through a momen- 
tous period in her spiritual and religious life. The Revival 
of Letters and the Reformation, thus entering England 
at almost the same time, had produced confusion and 



SPENSER. 203 

antagonism. Some men were tempted to forget every- 
thing in the pure joy of life and in the passion for beauty; 
while others, in the zeal of their protest against the delights 
of the senses, condemned art altogether, and grew more 
rigid and uncompromising in their morality. Men found 
it hard to reconcile Beauty with Righteousness; and the 
growing separation between the aesthetic and the 
ethical ideal, reenforced by political dissensions, divided 
England in the seventeenth century into Cavaliers and 
Puritans. Spenser wrote before the lines were thus 
sharply drawn, while men were yet confused by the jumble 
of new impressions and ideas, and Spenser is the rep- 
resentative of this time. He represents its incongruities — 
its conflicting ideals. He was at once an English Puri- 
tan and an Italian Humanist: he was a lover of the ideal 
philosophy of Plato, and he was the poet who brought 
into English verse the soft music and sensuous beauty of 
the Italian romance. To Milton he was the "sage and 
serious Spenser — a better teacher than Scotus or Aqui- 
nas." To Hazlitt, a brilliant critic of a later time, "the 
love of beauty and not of truth " seemed the moving prin- 
ciple of Spenser's mind. We need not attempt to recon- 
cile these opposing views; each has a large measure of 
truth. Spenser, standing for his time, was the child 
of the Renaissance and the child of the English Reforma- 
tion. He was the lofty moralist, and the "Rubens of 
English poets." 

Edmund Spenser was born in London in 1552. The 
same year saw the birth of Walter Raleigh in a village in 
Devonshire, and two years later Philip Sidney 
li]fe nSe began his short and glorious life in his family's 
splendid country-house at Penshurst. Spenser 
belonged to a respectable Lancashire family. His father is 
believed to have been a journeyman cloth-maker, who 
came up to London shortly before the poet's birth. What- 



204 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

ever his ancestry may have been, Spenser's family had 
apparently but little means, and he was forced to make 
his own way in the world. After attending the Merchant 
Taylors' School, then just opened in London, as a " poor 
scholar," he entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, as 
a sizar, in 1569. l His first published poems, translations 
from Du Bellay and Petrarch, appeared in the same year 
in a curious miscellany called the Theatre for Worldlings. 
The work is smooth and creditable, but the especial value 
of the poem is its indication of Spenser's early interest 
in the French and Italian literatures. While at college 
Spenser became acquainted with Edward Kirke (who 
afterwards wrote an introduction to the Shepherd's Cal- 
endar), and with Gabriel Harvey, who figures in the lit- 
erary history of the time as a learned if somewhat formal 
and narrow-minded critic, deeply interested in the devel- 
opment of English poetry. Spenser left Cambridge 
after taking his master's degree, in 1576, and spent two 
years in the north, probably with his kinsfolk in Lan- 
cashire. About 1579 he settled in London, where he be- 
came acquainted with Sir Philip Sidney, the mirror and 
pattern of the English gentleman of the time. Tradition 
has it that Spenser wrote his Shepherd's Calendar during 
a stay at Penshurst, Sidney's country-place. The poem 
received immediate recognition as a work which marked 
the coming of a new and original poet. It is an eclogue, 
or pastoral poem, in twelve books, one for each month. 
Spenser weaves into its dialogue some of his recent coun- 
try experiences, including his unsuccessful suit of a lady 
he calls Rosalind. He asserts his Puritanism, condemns 
the laziness of the clergy, and pays the customary tribute 
to the vanity of the Queen. In Elizabeth's time the. 
great avenue to success was through the royal favour, 

1 A sizar is "an undergraduate student, who, in consideration of 
his comparative poverty usually receives free commons. " — Century Diet. 



SPENSER. 205 

and Spenser tried to push his fortunes at court through 
his friend Sidney and the Earl of Leicester. It was 
probably through the influence of these powerful pa- 
trons that Spenser was appointed secretary to Lord Grey 
de Wilton, the new deputy to Ireland; and in 1580 the 
young poet left the brilliant England of Elizabeth, with 
its gathering intellectual forces, for a barbarous and re- 
bellious colony. In this lawless and miserable country 
he spent the rest of his life, except for brief visits to Eng- 
land; "banished," as he bitterly writes, "like wight for- 
lorn, into that waste where he was quite forgot." 

Lord Grey was recalled in 1582, but Spenser remained in 
Dublin about six years longer as clerk in the Chancery 
Court. We find an unintentional irony in the fact that the 
former incumbent, from whom Spenser purchased the post, 
a certain Ludovic Briskett, wished to " retire to the quiet- 
ness of study." Spenser was rewarded for his services by 
a gift of the castle of Kilcolman, part of the forfeited estate 
of the Desmonds. There Sir Walter Raleigh found him 

"Amongst the coolly shade 
Of the green alders of the Mullae's shore, " 1 

and heard from the poet's own lips the first three books of 
his masterpiece, the Faerie Queetie. Raleigh, a poet him- 
self, was filled with admiration. He prevailed upon Spen- 
ser to go with him to Court and bring his poem to the 
attention of the Queen. There was more than one reason 
why Elizabeth should look with favour upon the work. 
It was glorious poetry, and it was perhaps the most volumi- 
nous and elaborate compliment ever presented by a poet 
to his sovereign. Not only was it dedicated to " The most 
high, mighty, and magnificent Empress," Elizabeth, "to 
live with the eternity of her fame;" it was in itself a stu- 
pendous monument of flattery. The Faerie Queene her- 

1 Spenser's Colin Clout Come Home Again. 



206 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

self was both the type of Glory and the special revelation 
of it in the person of the poet's " most excellent and glori- 
ous Sovereign." Moved by the merits of the poetry, or by 
the extravagance of the praise, Elizabeth rewarded Spen- 
ser with a pension of fifty pounds a year (which he is said 
to have found great difficulty in collecting), and the first 
instalment of the Faerie Queene was published in 1590. 

Spenser remained in London about a year, learning the 
miseries of a suitor for princes' favours, and then returned 
in bitter indignation to his provincial seclusion. His keen 
sense of disappointment and neglect found utterance in a 
passage in Mother Hubbard's Tale (1591), which brings us 
near to the inner life of the poet himself. 

"Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride 
What hell it is, in suing long to bide: 
To loose good dayes, that might be better spent; 
To wast long nights in pensive discontent; 
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow; 
To feed on hope, to pine with f eare and sorrow ; 
To have thy Princes' grace, yet want her Peeres ; 
To have thy asking, yet waite manie yeeres ; 
To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares ; 
To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires; 
To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne 
To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne. 
Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end, 
That doth his life in so long tendance spend!" 

It is not often that we are permitted to get so close to 
Spenser as in these words. They give us a glimpse into 
the true meaning of his experience. We feel how he hated 
his exile in Ireland, when we see how deeply his failure to 
leave it for England had wounded him, and we can esti- 
mate more justly the effect of that dreary banishment on 
Spenser and his work. Shut out from all the excitement 
and rush of life that crowded Shakespeare's London, he 
turned from the repulsive coarseness and violence about 



SPENSER. 207 

him, to delight his soul in the languor and beauty of the 
Italy of the Renaissance. He lived in the dream-world of 
Ariosto and Tasso, and carried their gorgeous fancies into 
his Faerie Queene. 

After his return to Ireland in 1594, he married Elizabeth 
Boyle, "an Irish country lass," and paid her a poet's tri- 
bute in his Amoretti, or love sonnets, and in the splendid 
Epithalamion, or marriage hymn, a poem filled with a rich 
and noble music. Here also, besides writing several minor 
poems, he completed six of the twelve books that were to 
make up the first part of the Faerie Queene. About 1595 
Spenser again visited London, and in the following year 
published his Prothalamion, or song before marriage. 

It would appear from this poem that Spenser, in his 
longing to return to England, had again become an unsuc- 
cessful suitor at Court. He alludee to the death of his 
former patron, the Earl of Leicester, and speaks sadly of 
his own "friendless state." He speaks of his vain "expec- 
tation of idle hopes," of his "long, fruitlesse stay in Princes 
Court," and of the sullen care and discontent which afflict 
him. Ireland seems to have been Spenser's doom, and in 
1598 he returned to that misgoverned and perilous country 
which necessity had made his home. Shortly after, the 
miserable natives again rose in rebellion, and hordes of 
desperate men ravaged Munster. Spenser's castle was 
sacked and burnt. Although Spenser and his wife managed 
to escape, according to Ben Jonson, their new-born child 
perished in the flames. Spenser soon afterward went to 
London as bearer of despatches. Here he died a few weeks 
later (January 16, 1599) in a lodging-house, a ruined and 
broken-hearted man. Ben Jonson wrote : " He died for lack 
of bread in King Street, and refused twenty pieces sent to 
him by my Lord of Essex, saying that he had no time to 
spend them." 

Spenser stands alone. He is the one supremely great 



208 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

undramatic poet of a play-writing time. In youth he had, 
indeed, composed nine comedies, now lost, but 
a P poet. raS tne quality of his genius was widely different 
from that of Marlowe or Shakespeare. With a 
wonderful richness and fluency of poetic utterance, with 
the painter's eye for colour and the musician's ear for 
melody, Spenser lacked the sense of humour, the warm 
human sympathy, the feeling for life and action, indis- 
pensable to the successful dramatist. Chaucer possessed 
the dramatic instinct, and to it his triumphs as a story- 
teller are largely due ; the absence of this quality in Spenser 
retards the movement of the Faerie Queene and tends to 
make it vague and unreal. While that marvellous poem 
has a greatness of its own, it is not a masterpiece of nar- 
ration; it is, as some one once called it, "a gallery of 
pictures." Although he lived in a time of action, Spen- 
ser's genius is pictorial; and in the Faerie Queene, while 
we take but a languid interest in what happens, we are 
fascinated by the beauty, splendour, gloom, or grotesque- 
ness, of the 'slowly moving pageant which passes before 
our eyes. 

Spenser's avowed object, however, was not to satisfy 
the eye with colour, or the ear with melodious sound : in 
the Faerie Queene, and in several of his other poems, he 
aimed to be a teacher. England, as has been said, was then 
a battlefield of rival ideals and contending faiths; she 
stood at the parting of the ways ; and in the Faerie Queene 
Spenser proposed to show, in the form of an allegory, this 
conflict between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, 
self-indulgence and self-control. The contending virtues 
and vices are represented by the different personages of 
the story, and the general purpose of the poem is "to 
fashion a perfect gentleman" by exhibiting a pattern of 
noble manhood and by showing the beauty of goodness 
and its final triumph. In the first book Falsehood, or 



SPENSER. 209 

Duessa, is overthrown, and the Red Cross Knight, the 
"righteous man," is united to Truth, or Una. The 
remaining books are devoted to man's conquest of him- 
self; to the conflict between his higher and his lower 
nature. But besides showing the general warfare between 
good and evil, which is common to all classes,-Spenser ' 
aimed to portray the specific form which that conflict had 
taken in his own age. The allegory is thus confused and 
complicated by the introduction of contemporary issues. 
Thus the struggle between the saintly Una and the dis- 
sembling Duessa represents both the eternal warfare 
between Truth and Falsehood and the contemporary 
struggle between the Church of England and the Church 
of Rome. From time to time we dimly perceive the 
image of some great personage under this double veil of 
allegory, — of Mary Queen of Scots, of Lord Grey, or Sir 
Philip Sidney, — until, in pure bewilderment, we often 
abandon all attempt to follow the poet's inner meaning 
and wander careless and delighted as in a world of dreams. 
For the time at least Spenser the poet, the lover of beauty, 
dominates Spenser the Puritan, the preacher of right- 
eousness. We are led to enjoy without question the 
beauty which delights the eye, or the rhythmical undu- 
lations of a verse which satisfies the ear. Moral purpose 
and allegory are alike obscured by the intricacies of a 
story, which, as we advance, reminds us of a river scatter- 
ing its divided forces through countless channels, until it 
ends choked in sand. 

It would be a mistake to infer from this that Spenser 
was not in earnest, or that his moral purpose was intro- 
duced merely as a convenient framework for his poem. 
Among all this delicious and enervating beauty we come 
suddenly upon passages that sound like trumpet-calls to 
duty and to high endeavour, passages full of a lofty enthu- 
siasm and of a deep spiritual insight. Spenser revels in his 



210 IRE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

magic world of shining knights and distressed damsels, 
of dragons, fairies, and enchanters; but he feels at heart, 
as Shakespeare did, that the substantial world itself is 
but u an insubstantial pageant . " : He takes refuge in the 
thought of a Divine Energy, eternal and immutable, 
working above and in this shifting pageant of our world, 
the Master of the dissolving scenes. After all these en- 
trancing visions Spenser's weariness of the mutable shows 
which surround us, finds expression in the last stanza of 
his unfinished Faerie Queene: 

"Then gin I thihke on that which Nature sayd, 
Of that same time when no more Change sh all be* 
But stedf ast rest of aU things, &mely stayd 
Of : n the pillours of Eternity, 
That is contrayr to Mutabili::T 
For all that raoveth doth in Change delight; 
2 of rhence-forth all shall rest eternally 
With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight; 
0! -hat great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoth's sight! " 

But while the noble spirituality of Spenser is present 
in the Faerie Queene, if reveals itself almost entirely 

in isolated passages. Spenser's claim to be considered a 
great ethical teacher must rest not upon what he intended 
to do but upon what he actually accomplished. The soul 
of the Faerie Queene does not spiritualise the whole body 
of the work. The moral purpose can only be perceived 
by deliberate and conscious effort of the intellect; it does 
not force itself irresistibly upon us through the emotions. 
In Macbeth the lesson of the degeneration of a soul through 
, sin is the essence of the play; it is not deduced by the 
intellect, it is felt by the heart. But Spenser was com- 
pelled to furnish us with a prose explanation of his alle- 
gory; it does not explain itself like The Pilgrim's Progress. 

> Cf. Prosper: 5 spee.b jur revels no- are fi:^ etc . in The 
Tempest, Act w. Be, 1. 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. 211 

Nevertheless, after all this is admitted, the imperish- 
able charm of the poem remains independent of its story 
or of its declared purpose. No poet before Spenser had 
called out such sweet and stately music from our Eng- 
lish speech, and none had so captivated by an appeal to 
the pure sense of beauty. Spenser was a high-minded 
Englishman, a student of the ideal philosophy of Plato, 
with a touch of Puritan severity; but he had, above all, 
the warm and beauty-loving temper of the Renaissance. 
In his solitary Kilcolman, amid the insecurity, pillage, 
and misery of unhappy Ireland, he felt the full fascination 
of Italy. In the Faerie Queene, the half-pagan and 
gorgeous beauty of the Italian Renaissance finds its most 
perfect expression in English poetry, modified and re- 
strained by Spenser's serenity and spirituality and by his 
English conscience. With him we are not, as with Chaucer, 
admitted to the mirth and jolly fellowship of the common 
highway; rather, like Tennyson's Lady of Shalott in her 
high tower, we see in a glass only the passing reflection 
of knight and page. There are moods when this rests and 
satisfies; then, again, we look down to Camelot at life 
itself, and the mirror cracks from side to side. 

The English Drama before Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare is so much a part of our English civilisa- 
tion, we accept his gift to us so easily, and are so familiar 

with his greatness, that it is well to remind 
drama. 6 ** ourselves of his place as the king of all literature. 

Thomas Carlyle wrote of him : " I think the best 
judgment, not of this country only but of Europe at large, 
is pointing to the conclusion that Shakespeare is the chief 
of all poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our re- 
corded world, has left a record of himself in the way of lit- 
erature;" * and Emerson says, speaking for our own branch 

1 Heroes and Hero Worship; The Hero as Poet. 



212 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

of the English people : " Of all books dependent upon their 
intrinsic excellence, Shakespeare is the one book of the 
world. Out of the circle of religious books, I set Shakes- 
peare as the one unparalleled mind." * Criticism cannot 
explain how or why the country-bred son of a Warwick- 
shire trader should have possessed this supreme gift; 
it is the miracle of genius; but we can partly understand 
how surrounding conditions favoured the expression of 
Shakespeare's genius through a dramatic form. It is 
beyond our philosophy to analyse the nature of the mys- 
terious force shut within a seed, although we may appre- 
ciate the conditions which help its development. Let 
us look at Shakespeare in the light of some of those sur- 
roundings in which his genius worked. 

Shakespeare did not create that dramatic era of which 
he was the greatest outcome; he availed himself of it. 
He lived in the midst of one of the world's few great 
Shakespeare dramatic periods — a period equalled only, if 
partofadra- equalled at all, by the greatest epoch in the 
matic period. ^^ of Q^eee. The Elizabethan drama 
was more than a national amusement. More fully than 
any other form of literary or artistic expression, it inter- 
preted and satisfied the craving of the time for vigorous 
life and action. The theatre was then, as in classic Greece, 
a national force, and a means of national education. An 
immense popular impulse was back of the Elizabethan 
dramatist. The wooden playhouses were daily filled 
with turbulent crowds, and scores of playwrights were 
busy supplying the insatiable public with countless dramas. 
Shakespeare was sustained by a hearty, if not always 
discriminating, appreciation; he was stimulated by the 
fellowship, or rivalry, of a host of competitors. The 
number of readers was still small; there were few book- 
buyers outside of a little coterie of noblemen and scholars. 

1 Representative Men: Shakespeare. 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. 213 

Under these conditions it was impossible to make a living 
by writing unless one wrote for the stage. It was the 
dramatist who enjoyed the public patronage, the drama- 
tist who received the most substantial rewards, and 
an almost irresistible current impelled young literary 
aspirants, the clever, impecunious Bohemians, the men 
of genius and the men of talent, to choose the dramatic 
form. As Mr. Symonds has said, " Dramatic composi- 
tion . . . was a trade, but a trade which, like that of sculp- 
ture in Athens, of painting in Italy, of music in Germany, 
allowed men of creative genius to detach themselves 
from the ranks of creditable handicraftsmen. Shakes- 
peare stands where Michelangelo and Pheidias stand, 
above all rivals; but he owed his dexterity to train- 
ing." 1 

At first sight, this dramatic activity may seem to have 

sprung suddenly into being in answer to a new popular 

demand. The first regular tragedy was produced 

tto fl^tST about the time of Shakespeare's birth, and he 

Elizabethan was twelve years old before the first regularly 

licensed theatre was erected in England (1576). 

But the passion for life and action did not create the 
Elizabethan drama out of nothing; it rather transformed 
and adapted to its use a drama which had for centuries 
been an important part of the nation's life. This drama 
had its origin in religion: it dealt (if we except its latest 
developments) exclusively with religious or moral themes. 
At first it was in Latin, and entirely under the control of 
the Church, but gradually it passed out of the hands of 
the clergy, and it was no longer written in Latin but in 
English; it was acted by professional players and by the 
people, and it became a popular possession and amuse- 
ment. What, then, was the general character of this 
drama, and what were the principal stages in its growth? 

1 Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama, p. 61. 



214 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

This religious drama grew up on the Continent out 
of the need felt by the clergy for some effective means 

of popular religious instruction. The sendees 
ca^Dranu?" °f the Church were in Latin, an unknown tongue 

to the great majority of the congregation; the 
people were not only unlettered, but grossly ignorant and 
narrow-minded. On certain important festivals of the 
Church, therefore, the clergy arranged in the chancel an 
actual representation, or tableaux, of the event commem- 
orated on that day, that the services might be more intel- 
ligible and impressive. On Good Friday, for instance, the 
crucifix was taken down and solemnly buried, and on Easter 
it was brought from the tomb and replaced with elaborate 
ceremonies. Or, on Christmas Day, the Shepherds might 
be represented as coming to worship the infant Saviour. 
From very early times these scenic representations were 
accompanied by music and a brief dialogue between 
the principal personages, and the ceremony thus became 
more dramatic in character. As these dramatic cere- 
monies were 'introduced into the services, or liturgy, of 
the Church, they are commonly called the Liturgical 
Drama. 

Out of such beginnings, plays founded on various inci- 
dents in the Bible, or on some legend of the saints, gradu- 
ate Miracle an ^ to0 ^ sna P e - On the Continent the plays on 
Plays. biblical subjects were called Mysteries, and those 

dealing with saintly legends Miracle Plays, but 
in England only the latter name appears to have 
been employed. Miracle plays were brought into Eng- 
land by the Normans. It is probable that they 
were introduced with many other foreign customs very 
soon after the Norman Conquest, but the first mira- 
cle play in England of which we have any record 
was given by the pupils in a school near St. Albans about 
1100-1119. This was a play in honour of St. Kath- 



THE MIRACLE PLAYS. 215 

arine. It was produced under the direction of a Norman 
clerk, who had come from France to take charge of the 
Convent-school at St. Albans. The miracle play soon be- 
came domesticated in England. At first, plays were pro- 
duced in the churches, or in some ecclesiastical institution, 
then (as in the play of Adam and Eve, c. 1150) on a scaffold 
at the church-door, then in the church-yards, and at length 
on the village green, or in the town's streets. Gradually 
they passed altogether out of the hands of the clergy, and 
became English plays, acted by and for the people in the 
vulgar tongue. It became the custom to arrange a num- 
ber of these biblical plays in a series, or cycle, so as to pre- 
sent the chief events of the scriptural narrative from the 
Creation to Doomsday, in a dramatic sequence. Towards 
the end of the thirteenth century such cycles were acted by 
the Guilds (or incorporated associations of various trades 
and crafts) in some of the towns. Miracle plays were often 
produced on a movable platform called a pageant. It re- 
sembled a huge box on low wheels, and it was divided into 
two stories, or tiers. The lower story was commonly en- 
closed by curtains and used as a dressing-room; the upper, 
which was open at the sides, was the stage. The spectators 
assembled in groups at various places in the town, at the 
street-corners, the town-cross or elsewhere, and the pa- 
geants were drawn from group to group. Each pageant 
performed only one play in the series, and as one pageant 
followed another in regular succession, each group of spec- 
tators would, by remaining in the same spot, see the whole 
series of plays. Some times scaffolds were used instead of the 
movable stages. Four cycles of these plays have been pre- 
served, — the cycle of York, of Towneley (so-called because 
the manuscript once belonged to a family of that name), 
of Coventry, and of Chester. These cycles contain in all 
nearly one hundred and forty plays. The people as they 
watched the production of one of these cycles, saw the most 



216 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

dramatic episodes of sacred history enacted before their 
eyes. They saw the Garden of Eden, the first sin and the 
loss of Paradise: they saw the quarrel between Cain and 
Abel, the first murder, the Flood: they followed the story 
of man's destiny through the New Testament , or, perhaps, 
to the terrors of the Day of Doom. Crude as these plays 
were, enlivened as they were at times by a coarse and in- 
congruous humour, they were the result of an honest effort 
to make a great theme real and living to simple and igno- 
rant audiences. With such an audience, unaccustomed as 
it was to mental effort, the occasional introduction of a 
comic element must have been a necessity, and in all likeli- 
hood the mediaeval mind saw nothing irreverent or absurd 
in the quarrel of Noah and his wife before they entered the 
ark, or in the rough pranks of the shepherds on the plains 
of Bethlehem. These crude playwrights could form no 
notion of an oriental background: they had to make the 
shepherds English shepherds, for they knew no other. This 
introduction of a comic element and this necessity for a 
certain truth Or realism, had evidently an important bear- 
ing on the development of the drama. 

Not only did the laity need to know the Bible and the 
legends of the saints, they also needed to be instructed in 

Chinch doctrine and in conduct. To answer 
Plays. this need another kind of play, caUed the Moral 

Play, or Morality, grew up side by side with the 
miracle plays. The earliest extant moral plays date from 
the reign of Henry VI. , but mention is made of some still 
earlier. The main theme of the moral play is '''the con- 
test between the personified powers of good and evil . . . 
for the possession of man's soul." 1 In other words, the 
object of the moral play was to teach a moral lesson 
by showing in the form of an allegory everyman's life- 
long struggle with the various temptations which are 
1 Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Introduction, xliii. 



THE MORAL PLAYS. 217 

the common enemies of mankind. Thus, in The Castle 
of Perseverance, the earthly life of man in its successive 
stages of infancy, youth, manhood, and old age, is brought 
before us in the person of the hero, the representation, or 
type, of mankind (Humanum Genus). We see this typical 
man attended by a good and an evil angel; we see him 
yielding to various temptations, — personified as the World, 
Pleasure, Folly, and the like, — and finally saved through 
repentance and confession. 1 In such a play, in spite of all 
its artistic shortcomings, we find that conception of life as 
a spiritual warfare which is the basis of the Faerie Queene. 
The moral play of Everyman forces home upon the mind 
and conscience of the hearer a conviction of the shortness 
of human life and of the vanity of merely earthly interests. 
A sense of the imminence of death and judgment domi- 
nates the play. The profound impression which this play 
made upon modern audiences, when it was revived a few 
years ago, shows that the moral play at its best has that 
truth to the fundamental facts of human life, that power in 
presenting them, which give greatness and permanence to 
art. The almost unequalled power of this play consists in 
the universal importance of its theme. The experience of 
Everyman is, or will be, ours; each hearer moves towards 
the grave with him, and sees in his struggles and shortcom- 
ings the image of his own. 

Judging from the specimens which we possess, the mo- 
rality plays as a whole suffer from the sameness of their 
theme ; on the other hand, we see that in them the drama, 
once restricted to biblical or legendary subjects, p ~sses be- 
yond these limits toward a wider field. 

A further step was taken by John Heywood (cir. 1500- 

1 Cf. the allegory running through the successive contests of Gareth 
with Phosporus, Meridian, Hesperus, Nox, and Mors in Tennyson's 
Gareth and Lyneite. 



218 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

1565; in the composition of the Interlude} These inter- 
. . , . hides of Hevwood's were short, comic scenes. 

Interludes, 

intended, apparently, to be played between 
(inter luclo) the courses of a banquet, or immediately 
after its conclusion. The speakers in these witty con- 
versations are not personifications as in the morality 
play, they are characters taken from real life, as Johan 
the husband and Tyb his wife 3 a Pardoner, a Friar, or 
a Curate. Heywood, like Iris contemporary Skelton, was 
a satirist; and in his best known work. The Four P's. — a 
dialogue between the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Poticary, 
and the Pedlar, — neither the clergy nor the laity escape 
his keen ridicule. 

YTe have now traced the beginnings of the English 
drama from the time of the Conquest to John Heywood. 
Relation of who died in 1565, — almost to the time of 
miracle and Shakespeare. The last performance of the 

moral plays to L . l 

Elizabethan i ork miracle plays tooK place m 1579; the 
drama. Chester plays were acted until the end of the 

century. So the miracle play did not die until the end 
of Elizabeth's reign. It had overlapped the noblest period 
of the English drama, but it had long since ceased to have 
any direct and vital influence. At first sight the relation 
of the miracle and morality plays to the Elizabethan 
drama may seem fanciful or obscure, but in fact it is very 
real and vital. We find allusion to this older drama in 
Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights, and here 
and there we come upon an actual thread of connection. 
The Vice, who, dressed as a Court fool, supplied the comic 
element in the morality plays, survives in a more elevated 
form in Shakespeare's clowns and jesters. The drunken 
Porter in Macbeth is believed to be a reminiscence of the 

1 Mention is made of interludes as early as 1464, but the interlude 
as the term is commonly used appears to have been the creation of 
Heywood. 



EARLY AND LATER DRAMA. 219 

porter of the gates of Hell in a certain miracle play. At 
times we seem to discern a less superficial connection, as 
when Marlowe's Faust stands like Humanum Genus, between 
his good and bad Angel, or when, like the wicked in the 
miracle plays, he is carried off by devils to eternal tor- 
ments. In truth, the miracle and morality plays, with all 
their uncouthness and deficiencies, were sustained and ele- 
vated by their stupendous themes; they dealt with issues 
so universal, that later dramatists could hardly escape 
treating them again, although in a different form. Mac- 
beth is, after all, but a glorified miracle play. The scene, 
the time, and the actors are changed, but there in the 
Scotch Highlands, as in the Garden of Eden, we again see 
enacted the old drama of man's temptation, his fall, and 
his spiritual exile. But above all we must remember that 
for hundreds of years before Marlowe and Shakespeare, this 
religious drama fostered and kept alive a love of play- 
going among the English people. It made the drama a 
national amusement, a popular possession. This drama, 
essentially serious and moral, changed and supplemented as 
it was by the new ideas and fresh inspiration brought by the 
Renaissance, was a basis for the drama of the later time. 

Through the Interlude, as we have seen, the drama 
became less religious and didactic; by the substitution of 
The be * - rea * cnaracters f or personifications, and by the 
ning of the satirical treatment of contemporar}^ abuses, it 
regular drew nearer to life in its more familiar and 
e very-day aspects. All that was needed to 
transform the Interlude into a comedy was the intro- 
duction of a more fully developed plot. In making this 
transition, England was helped by the example of the 
classic, and particularly the Latin, writers. It had 
become customary to produce plays at some of the 
schools; and the schoolmasters, the schools, and the 
Universities, had an important share in the establishment 



220 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

of the regular drama, at this early stage of its growth. 
The first regular comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, was 
written about 1552 by Nicholas Udall (1505-1556). 
who was at one time headmaster of Eton College and 
afterwards headmaster of Westminster School. This 
comedy shows the influence of the Latin comic dramatist, 
Plautus. Another early comedy, Gammer Gurton , s Needle, 
was played at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1566. This 
comedy, unlike Udall's, is not a classical imitation, but a 
coarse and graphic study of rustic life. This fact is a sig- 
nificant one. It suggests to us that, in spite of the strength 
of the classical influence, there was a native force and 
originality in the English nature which would give to the 
English drama a character of its own. Nevertheless, in 
tragedy as well as in comedy the English dramatists began 
as pupils of the Latin. The first regular English tragedy, 
the Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, of Sackville and Nc r- 
ton, while it dealt with a subject in the legendary history 
of England followed the style of the Latin tragic poet 
Seneca. Indeed, the numerous translations from Seneca 
are a proof of his influence and popularity. 1 

Among the native forces thus shaping a new drama 
out of mediaeval miracle plays or classic adaptations, was 
the intense patriotic pride which, in the days 
patriotism on of the Armada, stirred England to more wide- 
growth of spread interest in her history, and to a warmer 
pleasure in the image of her triumphs. The 
Chronicle histories of England were ransacked for subjects, 
and her past reviewed in dramas which were the forerun- 
ners of Shakespeare's great series of English historical 
plays. Among the early works of this class are, The Famous 

1 Between 1559 and 1566 five English authors applied themselves 
to the task of translating Seneca. Ten of his plays, collected and 
printed together in 1581, remain a monument of the English poets' 
zeal in studying the Roman pedagogue. 



PATRIOTISM IN LITERATURE. 221 

Victories of Henry V., acted before 1588, Sir Thomas 
More, about 1590, The Troublesome Raign of King John, 
printed in 1591, and The New Chronicle History of King 
Leir and his Three Daughters, Gonerill, Ragan, and Cor- 
delia, acted two years later (1593). The influence of 
classical study also, was apparent in the choice of subject. 
Thus, there is an early tragedy on the story of Appius 
and Virginia (cir. 1563), and a Lamentable Tragedy Mixed 
Ful of Pleasant Mirth, Conteyning the Life of Cambises 
King of Percia (cir. 1569-70). 

We can better estimate the power of this patriotic spirit 
in moulding the drama if we turn for a moment to its in- 
fluence on other forms of contemporary literature. We 
have already alluded to the labours of such antiquarians 
and historians of this time as Leland, Stowe, and Holin- 
shed, and we have spoken of Holinshed's relation to the 
dramatic presentation of English history. 1 Side by side 
with this historical prose we find an enormous quantity 
of verse inspired by the same patriotic interest in the 
England of the present or the past. William Warner set 
forth the history of England from the Deluge to the time 
of Elizabeth in a much read poem of ten thousand lines 
(Albion's England, 1586); Samuel Daniel dealt with 
English history in his Civil Wars (1595); later Michael 
Drayton wrote his Heroical Epistles, his splendid ballad, 
the Battle of Agincourt, and his gigantic poem Polyolbion 
(1613-1622). The last named, a "strange Herculian 
toil" as Drayton appropriately calls it, is a poetical 
description of England in thirty books, containing in all 
about one hundred thousand lines. All these writers 
were bidding people to 

"Look on England, 
The Empress of the European isles, 
The mistress of the ocean, her navies 
Putting a girdle round about the world. " 3 
1 Page, 187 supra. 2 Massinger, The Maid of Honour, Act i. Sc. 1. 



222 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

From the historical plays already named we pass easily 
to a higher order of draraa in the Edward II. of Christopher 
Marlowe, Shakespeare's great predecessor, until we reach 
the climax of England's patriotic drama in the work of 
Shakespeare himself. 

About 1580 we find the drama rapidly taking form in 
London through the work of a group of rising dramatists, 
many of whom brought from the universities 
pr^de^ssors! 8 a tincture of the new learning. Many of these 
playwrights lived in a wild, Bohemian fashion, 
haunting low taverns, and consorting with the vilest 
company. Some of them, like the dissipated and unfor- 
tunate Greene, were beyond the pale of respectable society. 
Their means of living were precarious, for literature was 
not yet a recognised profession. Some of them wrote 
romances, poems, or pamphlets, as well as plays. They 
were, as a class, mere literary adventurers: scholars ac- 
quainted with the London slums, the associates of actors, 
then a despised class, if not actors themselves, and strug- 
gling to live by their wits as best they could. Prominent 
among these shapers of the Elizabethan draina were John 
Lyly (1553-1606); Thomas Kyd (155S-1595), whose 
Spanish Tragedy was frequently referred to by Shakes- 
peare and the later dramatists, 1 George Peele (cir. 1558- 
cir. 1598); and Robert Greene (1560-1592). 

1 The recent discovery of the precise date of Kyd's birth proves 
him to have been about six years older than Marlowe and Shakespeare. 
Some critics argue from this that he probably began his work before 
Marlowe, and contend that, in consequence of this probable priority, 
his share in the development of English tragedy is more important than 
was formerly supposed. Whatever conclusion we may adopt, Kyd 
was beyond all question an important force in the shaping of English 
tragedy. His Spanish Tragedy (written, perhaps, before 1588, and per- 
formed with great success in 1592) was enormously popular; according 
to a high authority " the most popular play of the entire age outside 
of Shakespeare." Like Titus Andronicus, it "reeks with blood.'' but 
the plot is skilfully developed, and there are evidences of dramatic and 
poetic power. Poetically, it is distinctly inferior to the work of Mar- 
lowe. V. Prof. Schick's preface to his edition of The Spanish Tragedy. 



SHAKESPEARE'S PREDECESSORS. 223 

The work of this remarkable group of playwrights must 
be passed by here with only the briefest mention. Lyly 
was an Oxford man. He aspired to be Master of the 
Revels/ and he knew the delays and disappointments of 
the unsuccessful suitor for Elizabeth's favour. "A thou- 
sand hopes/' he wrote bitterly in 1593 ; "but all nothing; 
a hundred promises, but yet nothing. " Lyly's plays were 
produced by two companies of .child-actors known as 
"the children of Paul's" (i.e. the choristers of St. Paul's 
Cathedral) and "the children of the Chapel" (i.e. the chor- 
isters of the Royal Chapel at Whitehall), and they were un- 
doubtedly acted before the Queen. Lyly was not a writer 
of great depth or power, but his comedies, though slight, 
are fanciful, lively, and entertaining. The dialogue, as 
in parts of Alexander and Campaspe, is often clever and 
animated. His light touch fitted him to excel in the 
lyric, and at least one of his songs, " Cupid and Campaspe/' 
has long been generally known and admired. Lyly first 
became famous by his two stories, Euphues, the Anatomy 
of Wit (1579), and Euphues and His England (1580). 
These books, which mark the beginning of the Elizabethan 
romance, were written in a curiously elaborated and arti- 
ficial form. This highly mannered and pedantic style 
soon found imitators and was known as Euphuism. 2 Lyly 
used this style again in his dramas. George Peele, like 

1 The Master of the Revels was an officer selected to direct the 
amusements of the Court, or of the household of a great nobleman. 
In Henry VIII. 's reign the Master of the Revels was made a permanent 
Court official. He took charge of the masks and costumes used in the 
public entertainments, and had various other duties connected with 
the Court amusements and Royal Progresses. 

2 Euphuism is thus denned by Dr. Furness in Preface to Love's 
Labour's Lost. " This style, when examined, discloses as marked charac- 
teristics constant antitheses not only in words, but in balanced sen- 
tences, and the antitheses are then rendered more noticeable by alli- 
teration; to this is added a profusion of illustrations drawn from 
'unnatural Natural History, ' to use Collier's happy phrase. " 



224 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

kyly, was a graduate of Oxford. He came to London 
about 1581, where he led a reckless and riotous life as 
poet, dramatist, and actor, and died miserably in 1597-98. 
His historical play of Edward I contains a fine tribute 
to " Illustrious England, ancient seat of Kings," and his 
pastoral, The Arraignment of Paris, a very simple and 
pleasing song, "Fair and fair and twice so fair." Peele 
had possibly less influence on the drama than either Lyly 
or Greene, yet his verse kindles at times into true poetry. 
There is a fervid and noble eloquence in his Farewell to Sir 
John N orris, and the sonnet " His golden locks Time hath 
to silver turned/' is worthy of the beautiful setting which 
Thackeray has given it in the Newcomes. 1 Greene, who 
left behind him the story of his pitiable life in his singular 
tract, A Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Re- 
pentance, is probably at his best in his comedy of Friar 
Bacon and Friar Bungay. The scene is laid in the coun- 
try, and there is a freshness, a wholesomeness, about the 
play, a suggestion of open air and sunshine, which contrast 
pathetically with Greene's stifling and sordid surroundings. 
But, greater than all these in the tragic intensity of his 
genius and the swelling majesty of his "mighty line," 
was Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), the 
immediate forerunner of Shakespeare. When 
Marlowe began to write, the form of the English drama was 
still unsettled. Under the influence of its classic models 
tragedy was inclined to be stiff, stilted, and formal; while 
in contrast with the work of the scholarly and somewhat 
artificial writers there were rude, popular interludes in 
jingling rhymes, full of rough, clownish tricks and jests, 
and without unity and proportion. Marlowe's fine touch 
did much to reduce this confusion to order. His verse is 
the finest before Shakespeare's; and stormy and riotous as 
was his life, his work shows the true artist's unselfish de- 
1 The Newcomes, vol. ii chap, xxxviii 



ELIZABETHAN THEATRES. 225 

votion to a high and beautiful ideal. Marlowe was the son 
of a Canterbury shoemaker, and was born two months be- 
fore Shakespeare. He graduated at Cambridge and came 
to London in 1581 to plunge into the vortex of reckless and 
lawless life that circled round the theatre. Passionate, 
unquiet, ambitious, Marlowe was spoken of perhaps unjustly 
as an atheist and a blasphemer. He dies before he reaches 
thirty; stabbed, we are told, with his own dagger in a low 
tavern at Deptford. The touch of the unknown, which he 
thirsted for like his own Faustus, stops him in the midst of 
his doubts, his passionate longings, his defiance, his love- 
making, and his fame — and at length he is quiet. 

Marlowe's earliest play (Tamburlaine, First Part before 
1587, Second Part 1590) portrays the insatiable thirst for 
power, the spirit of the typical conqueror longing for " the 
sweet fruition of an earthly crown." Another of Marlowe's 
tragedies, The Jew of Malta, is generally thought to have 
furnished Shakespeare with some hints for his Shylock in 
The Merchant of Venice. Edward II. drew more firmly the 
lines of the English historical drama, while Dr. Faustus, 
with its magnificent bursts of poetry and the accumulating 
terror of its tragic close, is full of that overmastering long- 
ing for the unattainable which seems to have been the 
strongest characteristic of Marlowe's restless nature. In 
these famous lines from Tamburlaine, Marlowe himself 
seems to speak to us : 

"Nature, that framed us of four elements 
Warring within our breasts for regiment, 
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds; 
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend 
The wondrous architecture of the world, 
And measure every wandering planet's course, 
Still climbing after knowledge infinite, 
And always moving as the restless spheres, 
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest — . " 

Plays were acted in England before any theatres were 
built. The Interludes, or the early dramas, were often 



226 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

played before the Queen or before some great noble on a 
Th th platform, at one end of the huge halls, perhaps 

at a great banquet or festival. When plays be- 
came a popular pastime they were often performed in the 
open court-yards of the inns. These square inn-yards, 
overlooked by the galleries or balconies which ran around 
the enclosing walls of the inn, are supposed to have fur- 
nished the model for the regular theatres. The growing 
delight in play-going seems to have produced a general 
demand for more permanent and commodious accommoda- 
tions. In 1576 a building known as "The Theatre" was 
erected in Finsbury Fields, in the outskirts of London, for 
the regular production of plays. A second play-house, 
"The Curtain," was opened a little later. From this time 
the play-houses rapidly increased, and when Shakespeare 
came up to London (about 1587) a number were in active 
operation. Shakespeare's own theatre, "The Globe," built 
1599, lay across the Thames from London in the "Bank- 
side," a part of Southwark close to the river. Other 
famous theatres of the day were "The Fortune," "The 
Rose," and "The Curtain," at the last of which Marlowe is 
known to have acted. The theatres were of two kinds, 
public and private. The first were large six-sided wooden 
buildings, roofed over above the stage and thatched; the 
pit, or yard, being without shelter from the sun or rain. 
Galleries ran round the walls, as in. the inn-yards. The 
stage projected into the pit, which was alive with dis- 
orderly crowds who stood on the bare ground, joking, 
fighting, or shoving to * gain the best places. There was 
little attempt at scenery; in the old plays we find such 
significant stage directions as these: "Exit Venus; or, if 
you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top 
of the stage and draw her up." * 

1 In Greene's Alphonsus — quoted by Collier, Annals of the Stage^ 
vol. iii. p. 357. 



ELIZABETHAN THEATRES. 227 

In more than one place in the choruses of Henry V. 
Shakespeare seems to be impatient of the slender resources 
of his stage-setting, as when he asks: 

"Can this cock-pit hold 
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram 
Within this wooden O the very casques 
That did affright the air at Agincourt?" * 

And in the wonderful description that precedes the battle 
of Agincourt he complains: 

"And so our scene must to the battle fly; 
Where (O for pity!) we shall much disgrace 
With four or five most vile and ragged foils, 
Right ill-disposed, in brawl ridiculous — 
The name of Agincourt. Yet, sit and see, 
Minding true things by what their mockeries be, " 

The private theatres were smaller and more comfortable 
than the public. They had seats in the pit and were en- 
tirely under roof. Performances were given by candle or 
torch light, and the audiences were usually more select- 
The following description by Mr. Symonds gives us a vivid 
notion of the performance of a play in Shakespeare's time : 

" Let us imagine that the red-lettered play-bill of a new tragedy 
has been hung out beneath the picture of Dame Fortune [i.e. at 
"The Fortune 11 Theatre, the great rival of Shakespeare's Theatre, 
"The Globe 11 ] ; the flag is flying from the roof, the drums have 
beaten, and the trumpets are sounding for the second time. It is 
three o^lock upon an afternoon of summer. We pass through the 
great door, ascend some steps, take our key from the pocket of 
our trunk hose, and let ourselves into our private room on the first 
or lowest tier. We find ourselves in a low, square building, not 
unlike a circus ; smelling of sawdust and the breath of people. 
The yard below is crowded with simpering mechanics and 'pren- 
tices in greasy leathern jerkins, servants in blue frieze with their 
masters' badges on their shoulders, boys and grooms elbowing 

1 Chorus to Henry V, Act i ' Chorus to Act iv« 



228 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

each other for bare standing ground and passing jests on their 
neighbours. Five or six young men are already seated before 
the curtain playing cards and cracking nuts to while away the 
time. A boy goes up and down among them offering various 
qualities of tobacco for sale and furnishing lights for the smokers. 
The stage itself is strewn with rushes ; and from the jutting tiled 
roof of the shadow supported by a couple of stout wooden pillars, 
carved with satyrs at the top, hangs a curtain of tawny-coloured 
silk. This is drawn when the trumpets have sounded for the third 
time, and an actor in a black velvet mantel, with a crown of bays 
upon his flowing wig, struts forward, bowing to the audience He 
is the Prologue. 

" The Prologue ends. 

"The first act now begins. There is nothing but the rudest 
scenery ; a battlemented city wall behind the stage, with a placard 
hung out upon it, indicating that the scene is Rome. As the play 
proceeds this figure of a town makes way for some wooden rocks 
and a couple of trees, to signify the Hyrcanian forest. A damsel 
wanders alone in the woods, lamenting her sad case. Suddenly 
a cardboard dragon is thrust from the sides upon the stage, and 
she takes to flight. The first act closes with a speech from an old 
gentleman clothed in antique robes, whose white beard flows down 
upon his chest. H'e is the Chorus. . . The show concludes with 
a prayer for the Queen's Majesty uttered by the actors on their 
knees." 1 

,l Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama, chap, viii. 



SHAKESPEARE. 229 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 

(1564-1616.) 

"I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, 
as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free 
nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expres- 
sions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was neces- 
sary he should be stopped. " 

— Ben Jonson. 

"But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be, 
Within that circle none durst walk but he. " 

— John Bryden. 

"The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble 
fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakes- 
peare. " 

— Dr. Samuel Johnson. 

"The greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced, 
our myriad-minded Shakespeare. " 

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

" Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
We ask and ask — Thou smilest and art still, 
Out-topping knowledge. 

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, 
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, 

Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. " 

— Matthew Arnold; 

There is on Henley Street, in Stratford-on-Avon, War- 
wickshire, an old house, with gabled roof and low-ceil- 
inged rooms, which every year is made the 
object of thousands of pilgrimages. Here Wil- 
liam Shakespeare was born, on or about the twenty-third 
day of April, 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, the son 
of a small farmer in the neighbouring village of Snitterfield, 
added to his regular business of glover sundry dealings in 



230 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

wool, corn, and hides, and possibly the occupation of 
butcher. His mother, Mary Arden, the daughter of a 
wealthy farmer near Stratford, was connected with one 
of the oldest and most distinguished families in Warwick- 
shire, The Ardens came of both Norman and Saxon 
blood, and thus represented "the two great race elements 
that have gone to the making of the typical modern Eng- 
lishman." 1 The influences about Shakespeare's youth 
were such as growing genius instinctively appropriates 
to its use. Then, as now, Warwickshire was full of that 
w ' ksMr abundant and peaceful beauty which has 
come to represent for us the ideal English 
landscape. In Shakespeare's day its northern part was 
overgrown by the great forest of Arden, a bit of primeval 
woodland like that which we enter in As You Like It; while 
southward of the river Avon, which runs diagonally across 
the county, stretched an open region of fertile farm-land. 
Here were warm, sunny slopes, gay with those wild- 
flowers that bloom forever for the world in Shakespeare's 
verse; low-lying pastures, where meditative cows stand 
knee-deep in grass, and through which wind the brimming 
waters of slow-flowing and tranquil streams. Stratford 
lies in this more southern portion; but in Shakespeare's 
day the forest of Arden reached to within an easy dis- 
tance of it for an active youth. Near his native town the 
young Shakespeare could loiter along country lanes, past 
hawthorn hedgerows or orchards white with May, coming 
now and then on some isolated farmhouse or on the cluster 
of thatched cottages which marked a tiny village. There 
was Snitterfield, where he must have gone to visit his 
grandfather; Shottery, where he wooed and won Anne 
Hathaway. There, in the midst of this rich midland 
scenery, was his own Stratford with its low wood-and- 

1 V. article on " Shakespeare," by J. Spencer Baynes, in Ency- 
clopedia Briiannica, ninth edition. 



SHAKESPEARE. 231 

plaster houses and straggling streets, its massive grammar 
school, where, as a boy, he conned his Lilly's Latin Gram- 
mar. A little apart, by the glassy Avon, stood old 
Trinity Church, its lofty spire rising above the surround- 
ing elms. There is abundant evidence that Shakespeare 
loved Warwickshire with a depth of attachment that 
nothing could alter. These early surroundings entered 
into and became a permanent part of his life and genius, 
and his works are full of country sights and sounds. He 
shows us rural England in such scenes as that of the sheep- 
shearing in The Winter's Tale ; he contrasts the free wood- 
land with the court in As You Like It ; he defines for us 
the essence of the ideal shepherd's life; 1 and in many 
a song, written to be sung in crowded London theatres, 
his imagination escapes to the fields and flowers of his 
native Warwickshire. 

And Shakespeare's Warwickshire added to natural 
beauty the charm of local legend and the traditions of a 
splendid past. Within easy reach of Stratford lay War- 
wick, with its fine old castle, once the home of the great 
king-maker of the Wars of the Roses. The whole region 
was bound by tradition and association to that great 
civil strife which is one of the chief themes of Shakes- 
peare's plays on English history. Near by was Kenil- 
worth, the castle of Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of 
Leicester, where the Queen was received (1575) with those 
magnificent revels, at which the boy Shakespeare may 
have been present. Travelling companies of players seem 
to have visited Stratford during Shakespeare's early 
years, whose performances he doubtless witnessed. He 
may even have gazed at the wonders of a miracle play at 
Coventry, a town some twenty miles distant, where these 
plays were frequently produced by the Guilds. 

1 Lines beginning, "To sit upon a hill," 3 Henry VI., Act ii 
8c. 5. 



232 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

Besides all that he gained from such surroundings and 
experiences, Shakespeare had the advantage of some 
Stratford instruction at the town grammar school, which 
Grammar he probably entered in 1571, when he was 
seven years old. The old school at Stratford 
had been suppressed along with many others when the 
monastic system of education was broken up, and the 
school which Shakespeare attended had been recently 
established by Edward VI. on the old foundation. The 
religious upheaval of the early part of the century, and 
the impulse of the New Learning, were thus felt in 
that provincial town, and the influence of this great 
change touched Shakespeare even in his youth. Latin 
was the chief study, and it is reasonably certain that 
Shakespeare, who remained at school about six years, 
gained a fair elementary knowledge of the language, 
although long after, the learned Ben Jonson spoke slight- 
ingly of his friend's scholarship. By 1577 John Shakes- 
peare, who had been prosperous and respected, was 
already pressed* for money, and about this time Shakespeare 
was taken from school. The boy, then about thirteen, 
may have helped his father in the business. According 
to an old account he was "apprenticed to a butcher." 
However this may have been, it is practically certain that 
he made himself useful in some way, and that his school 
life was interrupted because his help was needed at home. 
Just how the young Shakespeare earned his bread at this 
time, is, after all, comparatively unimportant; our real 
interest is in the boy himself. But as soon as we pass 
beyond the few recorded facts of Shakespeare's life and try 
to reach the secret of his personality, we enter the doubt- 
ful region of theory and conjecture. We can only infer 
or imagine what he was, thought, felt, or aspired to, dur- 
ing those years of youth and early manhood. We cannot 
"pluck out the heart of his mystery": we are still, in 



SHAKESPEARE. 233 

Emerson's phrase, "out of doors." The most we can do 
is to fancy ourselves in Shakespeare's Warwickshire; to 
picture its country life, its remoteness from the great 
world, the oddities of its rustics (reproduced, perhaps, 
in the clownish artisans of A Midsummer Night's Dream), 
and the narrow self-importance of its local magnates. 
We may feel sure that the marvellously receptive mind of 
Shakespeare was not insensible to these things. We may 
feel sure that with his deep and delicate apprehension of 
human life and of the world of Nature, he was quick to 
respond to the beauty, the pathos, the comedy, and the 
tragedy, that lay around him. This was his school: his 
simple neighbours, his homely duties, his rustic pleasures, 
gave him his first materials for his art. Here he first 
strove to spell out the meaning of that great volume which 
he afterward spoke of as " Nature's infinite book of 
secrecy." 1 

Nevertheless, all that we know of Shakespeare leads us 
to imagine that he was not merely the dreamy and medi- 
tative spectator of life at this time, but rather one who 
flung himself into its varied experiences with the zest of 
an abounding vitality. We are rather led to think of him 
in these early years as hot-headed, passionate, even, per- 
haps, as a trifle lawless, as "a man whose blood is warm 
within." 2 In 1582, when he was only eighteen, and in 
spite of his father's straitened circumstances, he married 
. Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years older 

than himself. Three or four years later he left 
his wife and children and went to London to wrestle with 
Fortune; coming "as others do" to try against the great 
"General Challenger" the strength of his youth. 3 Ac- 
cording to an old tradition, the immediate reason for 

1 Antony and Cleopatra, Act i. Sc. 2. 

2 Merchant of Venice, Act i. Sc. 1. 

3 As You Like It, Act i. Sc. 2. 



234 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

Shakespeare's leaving Stratford was his quarrel with Sir 
Thomas Lucy, a neighbouring landed proprietor. "He 
had/' writes the chief authority for the story, "by a mis- 
fortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill 
company, and, among them, some, that made a frequent 
practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with them more 
than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas 
Lucy of Charlecote near Stratford. " " For this, " says the 
original authority for the story, "he was prosecuted by 
that gentleman [Lucy], as he thought, somewhat too 
severely-; and, in order to revenge the ill-usage, he made 
a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first 
essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so 
very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him 
to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business 
and family in Warwickshire for some time and shelter 
himself in London." 1 This story is probably not with- 
out some foundation; but, in any case, Shakespeare's 
establishment in London is exactly what his circum- 
stances would lead us to expect. In 1585 he had a wife 
and three children to support, his father's money affairs 
had gone from bad to worse, and Shakespeare, strong as 
we may imagine in the hopes and confidence of youth and 
genius, had every reason to feel provincial Stratford too 
cramped for his powers. 

"The spirit of a youth 
That means to be of note, begins betimes." 2 

When Shakespeare reached London (1587 ?) the drama 
was rapidly gaining in popular favour; clever } 7 oung play- 
wrights were giving it form, and Marlowe had 
in London™ recently produced his Tamburlaine. We know 
nothing of Shakespeare's life during his first few 
years in London. There is a story that he was first em- 

1 Nicholas Rowe, Life of Shakespeare. 

2 Antony and Cleopatra, Act iv. Sc. 4, 



SHAKESPEARE. 235 

ployed at a theatre in holding the horses of those who 
rode to the play ; and that he had a number of boys to 
assist him. This, however, is generally distrusted. We 
do know that Shakespeare became an actor and that he 
made a place for himself among the crowd of struggling 
dramatists, arousing the envy of Greene by his rapid 
advance in favour. 

He became a member of a leading company of players, 
the "Lord Chamberlain's Company," and by 1592 he had 
fairly entered upon a prosperous career. 1 In some way 
he commended himself to the young Earl of Southampton, 
to whom he dedicated his first poem, the Venus and Adonis, 
in 1593. Shakespeare seems to have begun his 
' work as a dramatist by adapting and partially 
rewriting old plays. Titus Andronicus, & coarse and brutal 
tragedy, was probably one of the plays thus touched up 
by Shakespeare in his 'prentice period. His arrangement 
of Henry VI. (Part I.) was brought out in 1592, and seems 
to have done much to bring him into notice. Among these 
earlier plays (written before 1598) were The Comedy of 
Errors, in which Shakespeare joins the imitators of Plautus; 
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, into 
which many characteristic features of the Italian comedy 
were introduced, and the poetic fantasy of A Midsummer 
Night's Dream. Thus we see that Shakespeare, like the 
other dramatists of his time, turned at the very outset to 
classic models and contemporary Italy. This early work 
of Shakespeare thus includes a tragedy, an English his- 
torical drama, and a number of comedies. Three forms of 
dramatic composition are here represented, and in each of 

1 At this time actors of any standing were organised in companies. 
These companies were licensed, and many of them bore the name of 
some great nobleman. Thus there was the Earl of Leicester's company, 
the Lord Admiral's company, etc. The Queen's company had ob- 
tained its license from the Queen herself. 



236 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

these three branches of his art Shakespeare afterwards 
became supreme. The tragedy and the history may be 
passed over here as mere adaptations. They tell us some- 
thing of the state of the drama when Shakespeare began 
his work, but they are not really his, and we find little 
trace of his genius in the blood and rant of the one, or in 
the monotonous dulness of the other. The comedies are 
amusing, witty, and graceful; but on the whole, they are 
slighter than Shakespeare's maturer work. Compared 
with the master's later creations, the characters are 
shadowy and indistinct; we miss too that strong grasp of 
fact, that intensity of passion, those passages of deep 
philosophic insight so characteristic of Shakespeare's 
more fully developed genius. Yet these comedies remind 
us of the preliminary sketches of a great artist, and they 
stand in a direct and evident relation to that which is to 
follow. Certain incidents or situations in these comedies 
were used again by Shakespeare in a slightly modified form. 
If many of tjie characters seem a trifle nebulous, two or 
three at least are distinctly human and substantial. The- 
seus in A Midsummer Night's Dream has an heroic large- 
ness of stature, a nobility which leads us to place him 
with Shakespeare's great men of action. Launce with 
his inseparable dog, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is 
the worthy precursor of Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant 
of Venice, and of a glorious procession of clowns and 
jesters. Here too is Bully Bottom, the incarnation of 
invincible, arrogant, and uncomprehending common sense, 
the complacent British Philistine solidly established in 
the midst of Shakespeare's filmy and gossamer world 
of imaginations and dreams. Indeed, A Midsummer 
Night's Dream, which is commonly thought to have been 
the latest of those early comedies, easily rises above them 
all in breadth of conception, imagination, beauty, and 
suggest iveness. Incongruous as a dream, it has yet an 



SHAKESPEARE. 237 

essential unity. Through all the whimsical happenings 
of the play we are led to perceive that the world of exter- 
nal phenomena is for each one exactly what his imagi- 
nation "bodies forth." For us, in Hamlet's phrase, it is 
"thinking makes it so." The ideal and the so-called fact 
are placed in sharp juxtaposition in this play, but we 
are taught to see that the imagination interprets or trans- 
forms the f act, makes a bush into a bear, or " sees Helen's 
beauty in a brow of Egypt." 1 In A Midsummer Night's 
Dream, unreal as it seems, we find the germ of Hamlet 
and The Tempest. 

From this world of high imagination and homespun fact, 
Shakespeare turned to the story of England's past. In 
The English 1594 he produced Richard II., and the other 
historical plays of his great English historical series fol- 
lowed in quick succession. Begun a few years 
after the defeat of the great Armada, these plays reflect the 
triumphant patriotism of the time. In them, too, Shakes- 
peare holds his faithful mirror up to the contrasted aspects 
of England's life. These plays are not merely nobly 
patriotic, they are, above all, broadly human. They show 
us the usurper Henry IV. sleepless in his lonely power, and 
the jolly roisterers in the taverns of East cheap; the aspiring 
Hotspur, who would " pluck bright honour from the pale- 
faced moon;" 2 and the fat, comfortable, companionable 
Jack Falstaff, the bulky incarnation of materialism, glori- 
fied by kindliness and humour, to whom "honour" is but 
a word. 3 He shows us two royal failures: the incapable 
Richard II. with his strain of poetry and sentiment, and 
the saintly but ineffectual Henry VI. He shows us also 
his hero-king Henry V., the doer of great deeds. 

After the completion of this series of historical studies, 

1 Midsummer Night's Dream, Act v. Sc. 1. 
» Henry IV., Part i, Act i. Sc. 3. 
3 Henry IV., Part i, Act v. Sc. 2. 



238 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

Shakespeare turned for a time to comedy. The witty and 
brilliant Much Ado About Nothing, with its 
inimitable Dogberry and its touch of tragedy, 
the woodland pastoral As You Like It, and Twelfth Night 
were written during this time. Meanwhile, so far as his 
worldly affairs were concerned, Shakespeare had steadily 
prospered. In these active and hard-working years he grew 
in fortune as well as in reputation; he showed 
prosperity. hi m self a practical and capable man of business 
as well as a transcendent genius, and by his char- 
acter he won the love and respect of his fellows. By 1597 
he was able to buy a home for himself in his beloved Strat- 
ford. In 1599 he was one of the proprietors of " The Globe 
Theatre," built in that year. In 1606, a further purchase 
of one hundred and seven acres of land at Stratford is made 
by William Shakespeare, Gentleman. Thus, while he is add- 
ing to the treasures of the world's literature, the thoughts 
and ambitions of this country-bred Shakespeare seem to 
return and centre about the Stratford of Ms youth. 

Up to this time, Shakespeare's success had been in com- 
edy and in the historical drama. He had, indeed, written 
Borneo and Juliet, that rapturous and romantic tragedy of 
ill-fated love, and, in scattered passages, had given hints of 
his power to sound the depths of yet profounder passion. 
But toward the close of the sixteenth century a change 
begins to be apparent in the spirit of Shakespeare's work. 
As early as 1594—1595 he had already composed a number, 
perhaps the greater part of his Sonnets, poems 
' in which, as some contend, he "unlocked his 
heart." We cannot tell whether these Sonnets are dramatic 
studies or whether they are the veiled revelation of Shakes- 
peare's personal experience. In either case, they show us 
that while he was still writing his joyous comedies, 
Shakespeare's mind was already turning toward deeper 
and more tragic issues, The general tone of the Sonnets 



SHAKESPEARE. 239 

is sombre. They are full of unrest; of gloomy reflections, 
darkening into despair. We read of a conflict between 
love and duty, of the passing of youth, of the death of 
friends, "hid in death's dateless night," of a profound dis- 
gust for a world in which evil is captain over good. 1 We 
find here the cry of one, who, like Hamlet, is tired of such 
a flat and unprofitable world. 

However we may choose to interpret these sonnets (or 
whether we believe them to be a riddle that cannot now be 

solved), we cannot but see in them a foreshad- 
tra^period. owin g of Shakespeare's tragic mood. Twelfth 

Night, although written a little later than the 
greater part of the Sonnets, is a rollicking comedy, alive 
with the spirit of reckless, almost defiant enjoyment. The 
solemn, Puritanic Malvolio is the butt of the jolly, drunken 
Sir Toby and the quick-witted Maria, yet even in this play 
the mirth is not wholly careless. The note of warning 
mingles with the clown's song: "What's to come is still 
unsure; " love is not "hereafter," seize it now, for — 

" Youth's a stuff will not endure." 

The words at least seem prophetic. So far as we can 
judge from the character of his work, Shakespeare's own 
youth was to endure no longer. In the same year in which 
he wrote Twelfth Night (1601), he began in Julius Ccesar 
that great series of plays which won him a place among the 
supreme tragic poets of the world. In play after play we 
now find him turning from the humourous and gayer side of 
life to face the ultimate problems of existence, and to sound 
the depths of human weakness, agony, and crime. Some 

1 See especially the Sonnet Ixvi., "Tired with all these, for rest- 
ful death I cry." Sonnet xxx., "When to the sessions of sweet, silent 
thought," etc. Sonnet Ixxiii., "That time of year thou mayst in 
me behold/' and consult inter alia Sonnets cli., cxliv. } cxxix., xxix., 
ex., cxi. 



240 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

think that these great tragedies were wrought out of the 
suffering and bitterness of Shakespeare's own experience. 
Some connect them with the death of his only son in 1596, 
some with the loss of his father in 1601, some with a pain- 
ful experience which they believe to be recorded in the 
Sonnets, some with the death of the Earl of Essex, 1601. 
These theories are more or less probable, but they are mere 
theories, incapable of exact proof. Shakespeare's more 
earnest and searching mood may have originated in some 
troubles without, or it may be that " midway in this mortal 
life," having come to the fulness of his powers, he was 
forced by the very greatness and intensity of his nature to 
probe life to the centre. When he wrote Julius Cozsar, 
he was about thirty-six, he was still young in years, and he 
had won both money and reputation. It may be that 
having gained the immediate objects of his ambition, his 
thoughts turned elsewhere. The vital thing is, that, from 
whatever cause, Shakespeare appears to have passed through 
a period of spiritual conflict. Most thinking men have 
faced some such crisis of doubt and questioning; perhaps 
only the greatest souls have known its full bitterness. 
"Name it as we choose: with or without visible Devil, 
whether in the natural Desert of rocks and sands, or in the 
populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness, — to such 
Temptation are we all called." * Obviously the scope and 
meaning of the great tragedies of this period cannot be put 
into a few sentences; Hamlet and Lear cannot be reduced 
to a formula. Yet it is evident that the thought of Shakes- 
peare in these plays is largely occupied with the great fact 
of sin; sin, not in its remote and possible origin, 
•tu^es e of r shi. nor even m * ts relation to a life hereafter, but 
sin as it is in this present world. Whatever form 
it assumes, — covetous ambition, envy, malice, ingratitude, 
— sin is represented as an ulcer at the hea T, t of life, poison- 
1 Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Bk. ii. chap. ix. v. als<* Bk. ii. chap. vii. 



SHAKESPEARE. 241 

ing its very source, and bringing with it a train of miseries 
which confound alike the innocent and the guilty. In 
Macbeth we are present at the ruin of a soul, standing ir- 
resolute at the brink of the first crime and then hurrying 
recklessly from guilt to guilt; in Othello we see the help- 
lessness of a "noble nature' ' in the hands of fiendish in- 
genuity and malice; Ophelia, the "fair rose of May," and 
Hamlet, perish with the guilty King and Queen; the out- 
cast Lear, "more sinned against than sinning," and the 
spotless Cordelia fall victims to a monstrous wickedness: 

"Not the first 
Who with best meaning have incurred the worst. 

The stress and turmoil of these mighty tragedies cul- 
minates in King Lear. In Hamlet, terrible as is the protest 
against the depravity and inadequacy of the world, it is to 
some extent the protest of the philosophic observer, the 
idealist in the first bitterness of disillusion; in Othello we 
are largely absorbed by the immediate pathos of the drama, 
and all general considerations are forgotten in the pure 
"pity of it;" in Macbeth the gloom deepens, until finally 
in Lear the tempest of revolt rises to its greatest height. 
One sufferer after another seeks to solve the riddle of hu- 
man misery by some despairing or impious theory. Men's 
destinies are governed by the stars; by an "opposeless" 
and inscrutable will; they are the victims of a malicious 
power: 

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; 
They kill us for their sport." l 

Shakespeare does not seek to evade or to palliate, he 
faces the worst, and he reports honestly with that fear- 
less sincerity which is characteristic of his genius. He 
shows us the worst, and yet he makes us feel that human 

1 Lear, Act iv. Sc. 1. 



242 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

society, with all its imperfections, rests securely on the 
basis of a moral order. He shows us that there is nothing 
so loathsome and noxious as sin, nothing so beautiful as 
goodness. He shows us that high endeavour, greatness, 
and innocence cannot really fail so long as they remain 
true to themselves, because they are their own exceeding 
great reward. He makes the good suffer, but he shows us 
that to the good the uses of adversity are sweet. " Through- 
out that stupendous third act (of King Lear)," says a 
recent critic, "the good are seen growing better through 
suffering, and the bad worse through success." 1 Good is 
not " captive" in the hands of 111, it is free and invulnerable. 
It is enough that Brutus was " the noblest Roman of them 
all," though he lie dead for a lost cause under the gaze of 
the conquering Octavius. Worldly success may mean 
spiritual ruin; worldly ruin, spiritual success. Shakespeare 
does not explain the dark riddle of life; he does say with 
unequalled earnestness : " Woe unto them that call dark- 
ness light, and light darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and 
sweet for bitter." 

Shakespeare is no apologist for error; in his plays sin is 
laid bare in all its repulsive baseness and deformity, a root 

of bitterness fouling the sweet springs of life, 
for goodness. 6 The great moral distinctions which ■ — more than 

differences of class, or race, or intellect — sepa- 
rate soul from soul, are everywhere sharply and firmly 
drawn. If Richard III., or Iago, or the two woman fiends 
in Lear, reveal the spirit of wickedness incarnate, in no poet 
are virtue and holiness more lovely and divine. Our con- 
ceptions of the worth and dignity of humanity are raised, our 
ideals purified and ennobled, by the contemplation of the 
heroic in Shakespeare's world. Cordelia, Virgilia, Miranda, 
Portia, elevate and sanctify our thoughts of womanhood by 
their loveliness and polity. The knightly courage of Henry 

1 Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, p, 327. 



SHAKESPEARE. 245 

V., the faithfulness of Kent, the blunt honesty and loyalty 
of Faulconbridge, the Roman constancy of Horatio, all 
inspire us with a generous admiration for manly virtue. 
"Shakespeare," says Coleridge, "is an author, of all others, 
calculated to make his readers better as well as wiser." 
Yet with all his uncompromising morality, his stern con- 
demnation of sin, Shakespeare pours out over the faults 
and frailties of the erring creatures he has made, the ful- 
ness of a marvellous tenderness and pity. The humility of 
a great nature under the sense of its own shortcomings, 
the recognition of an ideal of excellence so stainless that all 
fail alike in attaining it, these personal traits, it seems to us, 
shine out through Shakespeare's lessons of forgiveness and 
of charity. Throughout all of Shakespeare's work, this 
compassion for human weakness, this large-hearted sym- 
pathy with human failures and mistakes, sheds a gracious 
and kindly light, but in two plays, Measure for Measure 
and The Merchant of Venice, the need of mercy is given an 
especial prominence. In the first, Isabella, imploring 
mercy for her condemned brother, exclaims: 



"Alas! Alas! 
Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once; 
And He that might the vantage best have took 
Found out the remedy. How would you be, 
If He, which is the top of judgment, should 
But judge you as you are? " l 



knd in the same spirit, Portia declares 



That in the course of justice none of us 
Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy, 
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy." * 

1 Measure for Measure, Act ii. Sc. 2. 
8 Merchant of Venice, Act iv. Sc. X. 



244 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE 

Thus Shakespeare, hating and condemning sin. teaches 

us that our human weakness requires another law than 

„. ,_ . that of rigid justice. Neither in our heavenly 
His chanty. ~ ■ , , 

nor our eaithly relations dare we stand upon 

our bond." Shylock, intrenched in the support of a lower 

and earthly law, fails to see upon what compulsion he 
'"' must'' be merciful. But Shakespeare, through Portia, 
points to the obligation of the higher law; he tells us that 
there is something not "nominated in the bond,'-' — even 
charity: the grace of a mutual forbearance without which 
human life would be literally unlivable. He enforces in 
his way the parable oi the unmerciful servant, "Shouldest 
not thou, also, have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, 
even as I had pity on thee? " 

Toward the close of his life, Shakespeare passed in his art 

out of his tragic mood to write some of the loveliest of his 

comedies, with undiminished freshness and cre- 

Last plays. . . ... . 

ative vigour, lire imagination which at the 

beginning of # Shakespeare's work budded forth in A Mid- 
summer Night's Dream, the fairy-land of Oberon and 
Titania. gives being to the dainty spirit Ariel, speeding at 
the command of Prospero, or cradled in the bell of the cow- 
slip; while in The Winter's Tale, the stress oi tragedy over, 
we can fancy ourselves back again in Warwickshire with 
Shakespeare, breathing its country odours and gazing on the 

"danodils, 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty. " * 

As Shakespeare's fortune and engagements permitted 

him, he seems to have spent more and more time in his 

native place: and he appears to have returned 

fo^SttStforf thei " e ab0Ut 161 ° ° r 1612< He had Said MS la5t 

to the world; for a few silent years that appeal 
profoundly to our imaginative interest, he lived in the 
1 "Printer* a Tale, Act iv. Sc. 3. 






SHAKESPEARE. 245 



midst of the scenes and associations of his boyhood, and 
then, on the 23d of April, 1616, the fifty-second anniver- 
sary, it is supposed, of his birth, he closed his eyes on the 
world. 

Shakespeare speaks to all times and nations for the Eng- 
lish nature and genius. He gathers and sums up the best 

Shakespeare tna ^ nas § one De ^ ore n " n — the Celtic wit, fancy, 
and the Eng- and deftness; the Teutonic solidity and sincerity, 
its earnestness, morality, and reverence for the 
unseen. To this capacious nature, drawing its forces from 
the genius of two races, awakened Italy gives her tribute; 
and through it the English Renaissance finds its supreme 
poetic utterance. 

A great lyric poet, a consummate if at times a negligent 
or careless artist, a man of commanding intellect and of 
comprehensive sympathy, perhaps the greatest single char- 
acteristic of Shakespeare is his union of righteousness with 
charity. The greatest voice of the English Renaissance 
testifies to the strength of moral fibre in the English, to the 
power of the English conscience. It is not only as a genius 
that Shakespeare compels our homage; our instinct tells us 
that, in addition to all his gifts as a poet, but inextricably 
associated with them, he was a great man. We are sure 
that his works, mighty as they are, are but the partial 
expression of a wise, opulent, and kindly nature ; and when 
Ben Jonson, moved to unwonted tenderness, declares: "I 
loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side of 
idolatry as much as any," we know that his tribute was 
just. This man, then, stands for the English people, a king 
over them for all time. "Here, I say," Carlyle writes, "is 
an English king whom no time or chance, Parliament or 
combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This king, 
Shakespeare, does he not shine in crowned sovereignty over 
us all as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying- 
signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of 



246 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

view than any other means of appliance whatsoever? We 
can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the nations of Eng- 
lishmen a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from 
New York, wheresoever, under what sort of parish con- 
stable soever, English men and women are, they will say to 
one another: 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced 
him, we speak and think by him: we are of one blood and 
kind with him.'" * 

Elizabethan Prose. 

The greatest names in Elizabethan literature are those of 

the dramatists and the poets, yet the intellectual advance 

of the time showed itself also in a rapid devel- 

Elizabethan , - « T • , 

prose. opment of prose. Literary criticism springs 

into life in such works as Sidney's Defence of 
Poesy (1580-1581), or Puttenham's Art of English Poesy 
(15S9). Prose fiction is represented b}^ Sidnej^'s elabo- 
rate romance, the Arcadia (1590), and by countless shorter 
stories from the rapid pens of Peele, Greene, and other 
struggling dramatists. Besides all this we have, in the 
reigns of Elizabeth and James, an abundant prose litera- 
ture of history and travel, and innumerable pamphlets on 
the questions of the day. Two men, Richakd Hooker 
and Francis Bacon, tower above the other Elizabethan 
prose-writers by their intellectual force, and by the broad 
and comprehensive character of then thought. Per- 
sonally, the shy country clergyman and the ambitious 
Lord Chancellor had little in common; but far apart as they 
were in character and in then aims, they were alike in their 
capacity for broad generalisation, and in their philosophic 
breadth and spaciousness of mind. 

1 " The Hero as Poet," Heroes and Hero Worship, by Thomas 
Carlyle. 



ELIZABETHAN PROSE. 247 

RICHARD HOOKER. 

(1553-1600.) 

Richard Hooker, a man of humble origin, was by nature 
3 thinker and a student. He was born near Exeter in 
_ 1553. His family could not afford to give him 

a University education, but at school the boy's 
beauty of character and his aptitude for study were so 
apparent that the Bishop of Salisbury, through the exer- 
tions of the local schoolmaster, procured his admission to 
Oxford. Here he remained for more than twenty years, 
becoming in time a tutor and a fellow of his College. He 
entered holy orders in 1581. Hooker was not only a pro- 
found student, he had that wide range of intellectual inter- 
ests which distinguished the great men of the Renaissance. 
He knew something of music and poetry, and was not " a 
stranger to the more light and airy parts of learning.' 7 1 
He had the placid temper of the student content to live 
in the world of thought. No worldly ambitions broke the 
tranquillity of his simple scholar's life, and when he was 
at last called to other duties he declared that he had lost 
the freedom of his cell. 1 After a few years in a country 
parish in Buckinghamshire, where he was found by two 
of his former pupils reading Horace and tending the sheep, 
he was called to London in 1585, to be Master of the 
Temple. 1 

It was a time of angry and violent controversy in mat- 
ters of religion. The Reformation had left many things 
unsettled, and England was filled with the wrangling of 
contending sects. Many of the clergy were eager for 
battle, and Hooker, who loved peace, found himself in- 
volved in a doctrinal controversy with a certain Mr. 
Travers, the afternoon lecturer at his own church. The 
situation was so intolerable to one of Hooker's tempera- 
1 Izaak Walton's Lives, "The Life of Mr. Richard Hooker." 



248 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

ment, that he asked the Archbishop to give him some 
country parish where he could work undisturbed. "In- 
deed/' he wrote, "God and Nature did not intend me for 
contentions, but for study and quietness." He had his 
wish, and in 1591 he became rector of Boscombe, in 
Wiltshire; there he completed the first four books of his 
great work on Church government, the Laws of Ecclesias- 
tical Polity, which appeared in 1594. The remaining years 
of Hooker's uneventful life were spent away from London, 
where he could "see God's blessings spring out of the 
earth and be free from noise." During the intervals of 
his parochial labours he worked on his book. In 1595 he 
became rector of a small parish about three miles from 
Canterbury, and there died in 1600. 

We must .not regard the Ecclesiastical Polity merely as 
a contribution to current theological controversy. It 
is not a controversial tract, increased in size and pre- 
served to posterity by the majestic eloquence of its style; 
but something widely different. Even Milton, 

Ecclesiastical • ,1 i , ,. . c ■, 

Polity. m ™ e heat oi party warfare, became an eager 

and bitter controversialist, so far forgetting 
himself as to assail his enemy with undignified abuse. 
But Hooker writes as one who is above the wrangling of 
factions. He is not a disputant, but a philosopher. His 
tone is dispassionate and judicial. He does not write 
to irritate or confound his opponents, but to conciliate, 
to enlighten, to persuade. His freedom from personal 
rancour, his calmness, do not spring from timidity or 
even from a mere love of peace. He was above a 
narrow partisanship, because he was able to view his 
subject in its large relations to the human society and 
to the world of Nature. The Puritan, assuming that the 
Bible contained the only revelation of God, rested his 
argument on his interpretation of Scriptural texts. But 
Hooker believed that God had not revealed himself in the 



ELIZABETHAN PROSE. 249 

Bible alone, but in the entire scheme of creation; he 
believed that the Universe was but a "manifestation" of 
"the eternal law of God." The order, which we, through 
reason, discern in creation, is a Divine order; the laws of 
Nature are but the expression of God's will. The large- 
ness and sublimity of Hooker's conception places him with 
the great spirits of his time. Bacon felt the reign of law 
in the world of matter; Shakespeare recognised the 
presence of a great moral order, of a spiritual law, in 
the world of man; Hooker sees God revealing Himself in 
the Bible, in Nature, and in human society, manifesting 
Himself in part through those laws which are the expres- 
sion of His will. This is the feeling which inspires Hooker's 
famous tribute to the majesty of law: "Wherefore that 
here we may briefly end, of law there can be no less 
acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her 
voice the harmony of the world, all things in heaven and 
earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, 
and the greatest as not exempted from her power, both 
angels and men and creatures of what conditions soever 
though each in different sort and manner, yet all with 
uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their 
peace and joy. " ' 

Hooker's style, though often cumbrous, involved, and 
difficult, is worthy of the greatness of his theme. In the 
stateliness, the dignity, the sonorous march of his ponderous 
sentences, he is the precursor of a long succession of great 
masters of English prose. It has been said that "he first 
revealed to the nation what English prose might be." 
There had indeed been great prose-writers before him, but 
it would be difficult to name one who attained to Hooker's 
especial kind of excellence. To find his peers we must 
turn to his successors and compare him with Raleigh, 
Jeremy Taylor, Milton, and Burke. 

1 End of First Book of Ecclesiastical Polity. 



250 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

FRANCIS BACON. 

(1561-1626.) 

Francis Bacon was born in London, January 22, 1561. 
His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the 

Great Seal, and one of the most trusted of the 
Bacon! 8 early statesmen of Elizabeth; a yet more famous 

statesman, Lord Burleigh, was his uncle by mar- 
riage. From his earliest years, Bacon was thus connected 
with the court and with public life. When he was eighteen, 
his prospects were greatly changed b} 7 the sudden death of 
his father. Bacon, who was the younger son, was thus left 
insufficiently provided for, and was compelled to make his 
own way in the world. He accordingly entered upon the 
study of the law, and although Lord Burleigh showed no 
disposition to assist him, his advance was exceedingly 
rapid. He was made a barrister in 1582, Solicitor-General 
in 1607, Attorney-General in 1613, and Lord Chancellor in 
1617. From this brilliant public success we get no idea of 
Bacon's inner life and deepest aspirations. He declared, 
in a letter to Lord Burleigh, written at the outset of his 
career, " I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, 
as I have moderate civil ends; for I have taken all knowl- 
edge to be my province." He early resolved that he would 
strive to benefit the race by the discovery of truth; and, 
although he seems at times to have been diverted by worldly 
necessities or worldly ambitions, he was always true, at 
heart to his lofty purpose. From his inability to reconcile 
contending interests — the love of place and power, with 
the unselfish devotion to knowledge — springs the tragedy 
of Bacon's life. In 1621 Bacon's worldly ambitions were 
overthrown at a stroke. He was accused of having taken 
bribes in his office of Lord Chancellor. He piteously con- 
fessed the charge, and was henceforth a ruined man in 
reputation and in fortune. Bacon spent the remainder of 



BACON. 251 

his life in the composition of some of the great philosophical 
and scientific works on which his fame chiefly rests. With 
Bacon, the philosopher and scientist, however, the student 
of English literature is not directly concerned. The story 
of his closing years is pitiable. " The Lord Chancellor/ ' said 
his former patron, the young favourite, Buckingham, " is 
so sick that he cannot live long." He still showed a brave 
front to the w T orld, and moved about with a courtly retinue, 
like the shadow of his former self, so that Prince Charles 
said of him : " This man scorns to go out in a snuff;" — yet 
he must have felt the burden of debt, disgrace, and disho- 
nour. He caught cold from exposure, while engaged in a sci- 
entific experiment, and died a few days later, April 9, 1626. 

Bacon is generally considered the greatest man of the 
Elizabethan age, with the single and inevitable exception 
of Shakespeare. Dean Church calls him "the brightest, 
richest, largest mind but one, in the age which had seen 
Shakespeare and his fellows." Yet, speaking strictly, Bacon 
holds a place in English literature almost by accident, 
and in spite of himself. He deliberately chose to be a Latin 
rather than an English writer, having no confidence in the 
stability of his own language, and believing that it would 
"at one time or another play the bank-rowte [bankrupt] 
with books." He even went so far as to have his Ad- 
vancement of Learning translated from English into Latin, 
so convinced was he of the superiority of the latter tongue. 
This book in its original form, the Essays, The History of 
Henry VII. , and a fragment, The New Atlantis, are sub- 
stantially all that English prose can claim out of the great 
mass of Bacon's w T ritings. 

Yet, while Bacon thought little of his work as an English 
writer, and threw the weight of his immense energy in other 
directions, it is his English works that have best held their 
own. In Raleigh's prose we encounter more impassioned 
and noble eloquence, as in those rare places in the History 



252 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

of the World, where he seems to suddenly leave the ground 
and soar in the celestial spaces; but Bacon's style has a 
more even excellence. Incidental and slight as Bacon's 
connection was with the literature of his own language, a 
high critical authority has recently pronounced him "one 
of the greatest writers of English prose before the accession 
of Charles I." 1 

Incredible as it would have seemed to Bacon, it is by the 
Essays that he is best known to the general reader. By an 
ffis " essay," Bacon meant the first trial, or weighing, 

Essays. of a subject, as distinguished from a finished 
treatise. 2 His Essays are pithy jottings on great 
subjects, informally set down, with no attempt to carry 
the thought to its full or natural conclusion. They read 
like the note-book of a profound thinker, a shrewd observer 
of life, a politic and active man of affairs. They are brief, 
suggestive, without an ornament, but closely packed with 
thought. They give us the concentrated results of Bacon's 
experience, and are often comparable to the proverbial 
sayings in which wise men have delighted since the days 
of Solomon. Often they go to the heart of the matter with 
one quick thrust, as in the famous sentence : " Prosperity is 
the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the bless- 
ing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction and 
the clearer revelation of God's favour." 3 

Bacon's own account of the object of the Essays is that 
he " endeavoured to make them not vulgar, but of a nature 
whereof much should be found in experience and little 
in books; so that they should be neither repetitions nor 
fancies;" and he desires that they should "come home 
to men's business and bosoms." 

1 Saintsbury's Elizabethan Literature, p. 209. 

2 Essay — assay = a test, or examination of metals, 0„ F., assai; 
Lat., exagium. See Skeat's Etymological Dictionary. 

8 Essay on "Adversity." 



SUMMARY. 253 

Three editions of the Essays were published in Bacon's 
lifetime; the first in 1597, the second in 1612, and the third 
in 1625. The first edition contained only ten essays, but 
by the third edition the number had grown to fifty-eight. 

We are apt to undervalue these essays on the first read- 
ing, and it is only through long familiarity that their wis- 
dom and depth really reveal themselves. Some of them, 
such as the essay "Of. Great Place," exhibit the high pur- 
poses of Bacon in strange and melancholy contrast to his 
actual performance. His life was a tragic contradiction, 
and in such declarations we ought not to believe him 
deliberately insincere. In thinking of his shortcomings we 
should remember, also, the nobility of his ideals. "If 
ever a man,''" says Dean Church, "had a great object in 
life and pursued it through good and evil report, through 
ardent hope and keen disappointment to the end, with un- 
wearied patience and unshaken faith, it was Bacon, when 
he sought for the improvement of human knowledge, for 
the glory of God and the relief of man's estate." 1 

Summary of Elizabethan Literature. 

We have seen England, lifted by the common wave of 
thought and emotion, find an outlet for her richer and 
deeper experience in the creation of innumerable works in 
every department of literature. To the careful student of 
history, the vast possibilities, the latent powers of the 
English nature are apparent from the first; the genius of 
Chaucer strengthens his confidence in the correctness 
of his estimate, and he sees in the supreme literary 
greatness of England, under the kindly influence of the 
Renaissance, the splendid confirmation of this view. 

We have approached this many-sided and inexhaustible 
period, chiefly through the study of three of its greatest 
men, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon. The first is su- 
1 Church's Life of Bacon. 



254 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

preme as a poet of dreamland, the second supreme among 
all poets, the last is the great thinker who stands at the 
gateway of our modern science. These men are indeed pre- 
eminent, but other writers crowd about them, each great 
enough to stand first in a less abundant time. The extent 
and richness of Elizabethan literature has made our study 
most limited, for so "spacious" is the time that on every 
hand are beautiful regions which we cannot even pretend 
to explore. For instance, there is all the literature of criti- 
cism, the books in which Sir Philip Sidney, William Webbe, 
and George Puttenham discuss the art of poetry; there is 
the literature of travel, books such as Hakluyt's Voyages 
(1589), in which the narratives of great navigators like Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert or Sir Walter Raleigh were collected; 
there are all the books of short poems, Tottel's Miscellany, 
England's Helicon, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, and the 
like, which tell us how prodigal the country was in song in 
that full time when England was "a nest of singing birds." 
Then, too, there are series of sonnets, such as those of 
Spenser, Sidney, William Drummond (1585-1649) ; the last 
perhaps the most Italian in tone and among the most 
beautiful of them all. We have spoken briefly of the drama, 
but only extended study can make us realise its power and 
richness, the great host of busy playwrights and their 
extraordinary vigor and productiveness. We have alluded 
to the prose-writers, but we must pass by the work of his- 
torian, theologian, romance-writer, and antiquarian, almost 
without mention. We are forced to leave these regions 
behind us unexplored, but it will help us to a firmer hold on 
this revival of learning period, if, before leaving it, we fix in 
our minds certain points of chronology that rise like mile- 
stones along the way. In doing this we must remember 
that such arbitrary divisions of literature are convenient, 
but not always exactly true, for literary periods are not in 
reality thus sharply defined. 



SUMMARY. 255 

First (cir. 1491-cir. 1509). We may associate the last 
ten years of the fifteenth and the first nine or ten years 
of the sixteenth centuries with that band of teachers and 
educational reformers who may be called the missionaries 
of the new learning. This period reaches from about 1491, 
the year when Grocyn lectured on Greek at Oxford, to 
about 1509, the year of the accession of Henry VIII. 
Conspicuous in this time are Grocyn, Erasmus, Linacre, 
Colet, and, in his young manhood, Sir Thomas More. 

Second (1509-1557). During this time the influence of 
Italy begins to be apparent in English poetry. Henry 
VIII. is a patron of learning. More publishes his Utopia, 
Heywood his Interludes, Roger Ascham his Toxophilus 
(1544), Coverdale and Cranmer their Translations of the 
Bible (1535 and 1537). Phaer's Virgil, Heywood's Seneca, 
and other translations of the classics appear. We note in 
Ralph Roister Doister the beginning of regular comedy. 
On the whole, the new learning is making itself apparent in 
literature, and the time is full of the signs of promise. 

Third (1557-1579). This period may be remembered 
as beginning with the publication of Tottel's Miscellany 
and ending with that of Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar. 
During this interval the coming of a mighty outburst 
draws nearer, the work of preparation goes on in the publi- 
cation of numerous classical translations; Sackville writes 
his Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates (1563); short 
poems and ballads appear in extraordinary numbers; the 
first regular tragedy is written, and innumerable Italian 
stories become popular. It is a time of growth, of prepa- 
ration, and of expectancy. 

Fourth (1579-1637). Between these years is the high 
noon of the English Renaissance. The period begins with 
the Shepherd's Calendar, the decisive entrance into litera- 
ture of the greatest poet England had produced since 
Chaucer. The ten years succeeding are marked by the 



256 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

rapid advance of the drama under Lyly, Peele, Greene, 
Lodge, and Marlowe, the immediate precursors of Shakes- 
peare. In 1590, with the first instalment of the Faerie 
Queene and the advent of Shakespeare, we are at the 
opening of twenty of the most glorious years in the whole 
twelve centuries of the literature. From about 1613, when 
Shakespeare ceased to write, we note the slow decline of 
this creative energy, and in 1637 two events occur which 
emphasise for us the ending of the old and the beginning of 
the new. In that year Ben Johnson died, the greatest sur- 
viving representative of the glory of the Elizabethans, and 
in that year also there was published the Lycidasoi the 
young Puritan, John Milton. Thus the old order was 
changing, yielding place to the new. 



CHAPTER V. 
THE DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

The England of Milton . 

Although Shakespeare and Milton are familiarly linked 
together in our ordinary speech as the two greatest poets 
Shakespeare of England, in the whole spirit and nature of 
and Milton their work they have hardly anything in corn- 
spirit of dif- mon. It is not merely that they are, for the 
ferent times. m0 st part, distinguished in separate provinces 
of poetry; that Shakespeare is above all the dramatic, and 
Milton the epic poet of the literature; the difference lies 
much deeper, and declares itself unmistakably at almost 
every point. Now, this is not entirely due to an inborn, 
personal difference in the genius of these two representative 
poets; it is due also to the difference in the spirit of the 
times they represent. For in a sense even Shakespeare was 
"of an age," as well as "for all time." * So far as we can 
guess from his work, he seems to have shared the orthodox 
politics of the Tudor times, distrusting the actions of the 
populace, and stanch in his support of the power of the 
king. In the true spirit of the Renaissance, Shakespeare's 
work is taken up chiefly with humanity in this world, rather 
than with its relations to any other; his dramas are alive 
with the crowding interests and activities which came with 
the Revival of Learning. But the England in which Milton 
lived and worked was stirred by far different emotions; its 
finest spirits were inspired by far different ideals. Milton 

1 "He was not* of an age, but for all time." From Ben Jonson's 
poem "To the Memory of Shakespeare." 

257 



258 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

interprets and expresses the England of Puritanism, as 
Shakespeare does the England of Elizabeth; and to under- 
stand the difference in the spirit of their poetry, we must 
turn to history and grasp the broad distinction between 
the times they respectively represent. 

At first sight the change from the England of Shakes- 
peare to that of Milton seems an abrupt one. In point 
Elizabethan °^ ac ^ ua l ^' ime ^ fte ^ wo poets are close together, 
and Puritan for at the death of Shakespeare Milton was 

England. eight yearg dd But nttle mQre than half ft 

century lies between that England in which loyalty to 
queen and country so triumphed over religious differences 
that Romanist and Protestant fought the Armada side 
by side, and that England which hurried Charles I. to the 
scaffold, or in which Cromwell declared : "If I met the King 
in battle I would fire my pistol at the King as at another.'' 
Yet in reality this change of the nation's mood was not 
hasty- or unaccountable, but the natural result of a long 
and steady development. 

We spoke of the Renaissance as the rebirth of the 
religious as well as of the intellectual life of Europe, and 
we saw that while in Italy the new life of the mind took 
form in what we call the Revival of Learning, in Germany 
the new life of the spirit had its outcome in that religious 
awakening we call the Reformation. If in Italy the 
Renaissance meant freedom of thought, in Germany it 
meant freedom of conscience. The Revival of Learning 
and the Reformation entered into England almost side by 
side. If the enthusiasm for the new learning, the luxury 
of colour, and the "enchantments of the Circes," had 
entered England from Italy, something also of the awaken- 
ing of conscience and the protest against Romanism had 
come from Germany, to find a deep response in the kindred 
spirit of Teutonic England. 

In our study of the Elizabethan period we have been 



MILTON'S ENGLAND. 259 

occupied chiefly with the first of these two influences. Let 
us look for a moment at the second. The Oxford scholars 
— scholars who were chiefly instrumental in bringing the 
new learning to England — were animated, as we have 
already seen, with moral earnestness and religious zeal, 
as well as with an interest in classical studies. They were 
scholars, but they were social and religious reformers also. 
Great events conspired to force these questions of religious 
reform upon the life and conscience of the nation. In 
the century which saw the independence of the Anglican 
Church; the uprooting of great ecclesiastical institutions, 
which had been the growth of centuries; the horrors of 
religious persecution; men and women could not have for- 
gotten questions of religion even if they would. It was 
the century, too, in which the interrupted work of Wyclif 
was accomplished — the century which gave the nation the 
English Bible. Just as the introduction of the study of 
Greek at Oxford changed the horizon of the English mind, 
so the introduction of Tyndale's translation of the Bible 
was an incalculable spiritual force. " If God spare my life," 
Tyndale had said to a learned opponent, "ere many 
years I will cause that a boy that driveth the plough shall 
know more of the scripture than thou dost." And year 
after year the inestimable influence of an ever-widening 
knowledge of the Bible was at work in thousands of 
English households. 

Beginning in the upper stratum of society, the new 
learning had worked downward until it touched the 

people. But the changes wrought by direct 
B?b e ie EngliSl1 contact with the English Bible, if slower, were 

even more vital and more extended. The Bible 
became the literature of the people, telling the poorest 
and plainest of the essential things of life in words which 
all could understand. If we find a typical picture in the 
crowd of London shopkeepers and 'prentices crowding the 



260 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

pit of the "Fortune" or the "Globe/' we find one no less 
typical in the eager throngs gathered about the reader of 
the Bible in the nave of St. Paul's. "The disclosure of 
the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution 
of the Renaissance. The disclosure of the older mass of 
Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the Refor- 
mation. " * 

With this new idea of religious liberty, the idea of 
political liberty became closely associated. Stimulated 
and emancipated by greater intellectual and 
and political religious freedom of inquiry, men began to 
liberty closely scrutinise and discuss the whole theory of 
government. They grew restless under the 
arbitrary rule of the early Stuarts, as their minds rose to 
the conception of their supreme obligation to a higher 
law; to a Power above the will of the king in the state, 
above the will of man in the kingdom of God. In the 
early part of the seventeenth century many things com- 
bined to call out and develop these new feelings. The 
middle classes had advanced greatly during Elizabeth's 
reign, in prosperity, influence, and intelligence; the dan- 
ger from Spain was at an end, and men were free to give 
themselves up to matters at home. But the natural 
growth of the nation toward a greater political and religious 
freedom was met by petulant opposition. Elizabeth had 
been wise enough to know when and how to yield to the 
will of her Parliament and people, but it was characteristic 
Arbitrary °f tne Stuarts to take a wrong position and hold 
mie of the to it with an obstinate and reckless tenacity, 
early stuarts. The unkingly j ames (1603-1625) flaunted what 

he considered the "Divine Right" of his kingship in the 
face of an exasperated England. In the early years of the 
following reign (Charles L, 1625-1649), the growing 
Puritan sentiment was outraged by brutal persecution, 
1 Green's History of the English People, vol. iii. p. 11. 



THE DRAMA. 261 

the rising spirit of liberty insulted by flagrant violations of 
the long established and sacred political rights of English- 
men. Thus the England that rose up in protest against the 
severities of Archbishop Laud and the tyranny and du- 
plicity of Charles, was on fire with other interests and 
other aspirations than that of Elizabeth; its energies were 
centred upon two great issues — politics and religion. 
In the one, it was determined to "vindicate its ancient 
liberties;" in the other, it "reasoned of righteousness and 
judgment to come. " Among its great leaders in politics j 
were Eliot, Hampden, Pym, and Cromwell; in literature ' 
it spoke in the strong, simple, biblical prose of John Bun- 
yan, a poor tinker; its poet was John Milton. 

Later Elizabethan Literature. 
The Drama. 

But while the new ways of looking at the deepest ques- 
tions of life, which for years had been agitating the Puritan 
element in England, were thus coming to the surface in 
history and in literature, during the early part of the 
seventeenth century many continued to write in the gen- 
eral manner and spirit of the Elizabethans. This later 
Elizabethan literature lies outside our present plan of 
study, but it cannot be passed over without a few 
words. 

To form any just conception of the commanding genius 
of Shakespeare, we must measure his altitude by that 
of his contemporaries. We must imagine him, also, in 
his daily human relations with men of his own class and 
calling: we must think of him as an actor among actors, 
as a theatrical manager, as one of that immortal group at 
the Mermaid Tavern which included Ben Jonson, Francis 
Beaumont, and John Fletcher. Shakespeare, said Haz- 
litt, "towered above his fellows, 'in shape and gesture 



262 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE, 

proudly eminent/ but he was one of a race of giants. " * 
Some knowledge of Shakespeare's contemporaries or 
immediate successors in the drama, is absolutely necessary 
if we would see either Shakespeare or his time in proper 
perspective ; but the number of these dramatists is so great, 
their total production so enormous, that the subject can 
be treated here only in the most general terms. We can 
do little more than enumerate some of the most im- 
portant names, and attempt to gain some general under- 
standing of the chronology of the period. 

The dramatists immediately preceding Shakespeare (see 
p. 222 ) were followed by a number of men of genius, who 
had the advantage of writing at a time when the theatre 
was a more recognised institution, and when the general 
form of the drama had been fixed by successful experiment. 
A number of these men began their work during the clos- 
ing years of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson (1573- 
1637), a big-framed, aggressive, dominant man, whose 
learning was not free from pedantry, produced his first 
play, the comedy of Every Man in his Humour, in 1598, 
and the earliest plays of George Chapman (1559-1634), 
Thomas Middleton (1570-1627), Thomas Dekker (c. 1570- 
1637), Thomas Heywood (1581?-1640), and John Mar- 
ston (1575-1633) date from within a few years of this 
time. During the early years of the seventeenth century, 
while Shakespeare was still writing, Francis Beaumont 
(1584-1616), John Fletcher (1579-1625), John Ford 
(1586-1640), and John Webster began their work. The 
first play of Philip Massinger (1584-1640), The Virgin 
Martyr (written with Dekker), was brought out a little 
later (1622). Among all these men Ben Jonson, while 
probably inferior to some of the others in his purely poeti- 
cal gifts, predominated by the solidity of his understand- 

1 Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, 
Lecture I. 



THE DRAMA. 263 

ing, the vigour of his work, and by the sheer strength of his 
personal ascendency. For some years before Jonson's 
death, the Elizabethan drama had shown symptoms of 
decline, and when he died in 1637 the force and production 
of this extraordinary dramatic period were nearing their 
end. Plays were indeed written after that time in which 
something of the old glory survived, but these are but the 
echoes of a greater age. At last with James Shirley 
(1596-1666), the greater part of whose work was done 
between 1625-1655, these last echoes of the Elizabethan 
drama die away. 

Looked at as a whole, the Elizabethan drama, even apart 
from Shakespeare, in its magnitude, its intensity, its beauty, 
its variety, its snatches of exquisite song, is one 
furvey °^ ^ ne mos ^ astonishing achievements of the Eng- 

lish in literature. In attempting to form any 
general estimate of it, we must remember that these dramas 
were, as a rule, not carefully elaborated literary productions, 
but acting plays, hastily put together for immediate use. 
Play- writing was an art, but it was a business also. The 
demand for plays was great, the price (especially before 
1600) was comparatively trifling. 1 Under these circum- 
stances, the dramatists naturally saved time and invention 
by appropriating such material as could serve their turn. 
They ransacked the literatures of Italy, Spain, or France; 
they borrowed from foreign novels or dramas ; they worked 
singly, or in partnership like Beaumont and Fletcher ; they 

1 "The writer of a play usually sold it to the theatre, but some- 
times to a kind of broker who stood between players and authors, buying 
from the one, and selling, so as himself to profit by the transaction, 
to the other. Such was Philip Henslowe, a dyer, a pawnbroker, 
theatrical lessee and speculator, who during the years of Shakespere's 
authorship had many dramatic poets in his pay. His diary still 
exists, and from it we learn that the highest price given by him for a 
play before the year 1600 was £8; the lowest sum is £4; while for an 
embroidered velvet cloak no less than £16 is given, and £4 14s. for a 
pair of hose. After 1600 the price of a play rose to £20 if the drama- 
tist was one of repute." — Dowden: Shakespere Primer, pp. 11-12. 



264 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

translated, they made new plays, they adapted or fur- 
bished up old ones. We can form no definite idea of the 
number of these plays; many of them are doubtless irre- 
trievably lost. Only twenty-three of Thomas Heywood's 
plays have been preserved, yet he declared in 1633 before 
his adventurous career was over, that he had "an entire 
hand, or at least a main finger," in the composition of no 
less than two hundred and twenty plays. Work produced 
under such conditions is naturally of very unequal merit, 
yet even in the poorer plays we are liable to stumble upon 
a passage that shows us that the lesser men could catch for 
a moment the accent of the masters. As Sir Walter Scott 
has so justly said : "The dramatic poets of that time (i.e. the 
early seventeenth century) seem to have possessed as joint- 
stock a highly poetical and abstract tone of language, so that 
the worst of them often remind you of the very best." 1 

Ben Jonson stands apart from this crowd of playwrights 
as unmistakably as Shakespeare rises above them. In- 
dependent, overbearing, and combative, prone 
to despise others, and upheld by an unfaltering 
confidence in himself, Jonson was not made for a follower, 
he was one to conquer and rule over a kingdom of his own. 
He doggedly fought his way to the front in the face of 
many obstacles. As a youth he was set to lay bricks, a 
"craft" which, he said, "he could not endure." He was a 
soldier in the Low Countries, where he killed an enemy 
in single combat "in the face of both the camps." By 
1597 he was established in London as actor and dramatist. 
About a year later he fought a duel with another actor 
at Shoreditch-in-t he-Fields, and killed his antagonist. He 
was tried for homicide, but escaped the extreme penalty 
of the law. He wrote comedies and tragedies, and during 
the reign of James I. he composed numerous masks for 
the entertainment of the Court. That learned monarch 
1 Scott's Journal, for August 1st, 1826. 



JONSON. 265 

made him Poet Laureate, and is said to have offered 
him knighthood, which he declined. He asserted him- 
self in the choice company of wits gathered at the 
Mermaid, or the Falcon Tavern, engaging in many " wit- 
combats" with Shakespeare himself. After Shakespeare's 
death Jonson was the most prominent man of letters 
in England. He was the literary dictator of London, 
and was surrounded by admiring disciples who were said 
to be "sealed of the tribe of Ben/' His last years were 
darkened with illness and embittered by disappointment. 
He had outlived his popularity, the taste of the time 
had changed, the visitor had out-stayed his welcome, and 
"told the jest without the smile." 

The differences between Jonson and Shakespeare are 
obvious and fundamental. Jonson's work as a whole is 
barer, more prosaic, more learned, and more laboured 
than Shakespeare's. Shakespeare, while he remains true 
to life, yet contrives to invest his mimic world with a 
magical atmosphere of beauty and romance. But Jonson 
is a realist. He presents the life of his time, but especially 
the low life of Elizabethan London, with a hard, dry 
literalism. His object in his comedies was didactic. He 
thought that the poet's mission was to paint a moral 
and to reform society. He ridiculed the abuses and 
fashionable follies of the time by making the persons of 
his dramas represent the peculiar hobbies or "humours" 
of men, but in doing this his drama lost in faithfulness 
to life through a method which inclined him to make the 
mere caricature of what we call a "fad" take the place of 
a character. The method of Jonson, great as he was, 
was thus a distinct falling off from that of Shakespeare. 
Jonson's tragedies, Sejanus and Catiline, are massive, 
scholarly, and painstaking, but they lack the warmth and 
humanity which distinguish Shakespeare's treatment of 
classical themes, and one is apt to read them with respect 
and with profit rather than with delight. 



266 DECLINE OE THE RENAISSANCE. 

But there was another side to Jonsons rugged nature. 
Ponderous a,s he often seems, he could write the lightest; 
and most charming of lyrics. Songs such as the ''Hymn 
to Diana." "Drink to Me only with Thine Eyes/" or 
"See the Chariot at hand here of Love/' are among the 
treasures of English poetry, while his charming pastoral 
drama. The Sad Shepherd 1637 ; , is filled with an un- 
expected tenderness and beauty. 

Beaumont and Fletcher,, "the great twin brethren of the 

stage." follow Shakespeare and not Jonson. The plays 

which pass under then joint names are full of 

Beaumont i 1 - «i 1 

and Fletcher, romance, beauty, and passion; there are melo- 
dies in them — as in the lyrical passages in The 
Faithful Shepherdess — which invite comparison with Shake- 
speare. But beautiful as these play- are. they lack the 
wholesomeness_. the masculine vigour, the depth of thought, 
the firm grasp of human character, which delight us in 
Shakespeare. They are softer, sweeter., more relaxing, and 
we feel that in them the sharp distinctions between right 
and wrong are blurred or obscured. So the work of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher, like that of Ben Jonson. shows in its 
own fashion that the decadence oi the drama has begun. 1 
So far we have associated the decline of the drama with 
a perverted theory of an and with a moral deterioration. 
Puritan hos- ^> llt we must remember that in addition to 
tility to the any decline in its original power, to any failure 
e '" age ' that came from within, the drama was force:! 

to contend with the bitter attacks of the Puritans from 

1 Among the most notable plays of this period exclusive of those 
of Shakespeare) are Phila-s:er and The M aid's Tragedy of Beaumont 
and Fletcher: The Duchess c f Malf. and The W'd:e Devil of Jen- 
Webster; The Changeling (a: least in parts of thomas Ifiddleton; 

A New Way to Pay Old Debts of Philip fMassinger; and The Broke-, 
Heart of John Ford. Cyril Toumeur (1575?-1626) wrote two lurid 
and horrible tragedies. The Revenger's Tragedy (printed 1607) and The 
AtlieUi's Tragedy (printed 1611). 



SEVENTEENTH CENTURY POETS. 267 

without. In the early seventeenth century this hostility 
to the stage increased; unsuccessful attempts were made 
(1619-1631-1633) to suppress the Blackfriars Theatre, 
and the representation of plays on Sunday was prohibited. 
Many of the more respectable people stayed away from 
the theatres altogether, while those who came demanded 
plays of a more and more depraved character. Finally, 
about the beginning of the Civil War (1642) the theatres 
were closed altogether, and the drama almost ceased until 
the Restoration (1660). 

The Poets of the Early Seventeenth Century. 
From the Death of Spenser, 1599, to the Restoration, 1660. 

The poetry of the early half of the seventeenth century 
is largely a continuation or a development of that of the 
greater Elizabethans. As we have just seen, many of 
the rising generation of writers were united by a personal 
loyalty to Ben Jonson, and by a reverence for his criti- 
cal opinions. Other poets took Spenser for their model, 
drawing inspiration from his pastoral rather than from his 
chivalric poetry, and following him chiefly in his more 
serious moods. Others, again, imitated the poetic man- 
nerisms of John Donne, another Elizabethan of way- 
ward but powerful genius, of whom we have not yet 
spoken. England at this time was a house divided 
against itself, and the religious and political dissensions 
which rent and racked the nation, divided the poets also 
into sharpty contrasted groups. Some, like the saintly 
George Herbert, expressed in poetry much that was best in 
the Church of England; others, like Milton, stirred by dif- 
ferent ideals, represented the militant and reforming spirit 
of Puritanism. But great as this difference may seem 
between the Anglican and the Puritan, it is insignificant 
to that which separates the Cavalier poets — the gay, 
elegant triflers of the Court, like Carew and Lovelace — 



268 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

from those poets who, apart in some respects, are at least 
united by a devotion to high ideals and by a lofty spirit- 
uality of nature. The variety of these schools, or groups, 
into which the poets of this time may be divided, the irre- 
concilable differences in feeling, and in the general attitude 
towards life, are characteristic of the confusion of the 
time. This diversity, we must remember, is not wholly 
due to the inevitable differences in human character, it is 
also national, for it is the literary expression of those con- 
flicting beliefs and ideals which were fought out in the 
Civil War. 

Spenser, "the poet's poet, " exercised a profound and im- 
portant influence on English poetry, both in his own and 
succeeding times. When he died, his work un- 
seiia/schooi. finished, England was just midway in an illus- 
trious era, and in the full tide of literary produc- 
tion. But while many great poets survived him, Spenser's 
loss was deeply felt, and his effect upon the poetry of the 
early seventeenth century was probably greater than that of 
any other Elizabethan, not excepting Shakespeare himself. 
Apart from his general and less definite influence, Spenser's 
effect on some of his successors was direct and specific. The 
chief of these disciples of Spenser are the brothers Giles and 
Phineas Fletcher, first cousins of John Fletcher the 
dramatist, and William Browne. The Fletchers are cer- 
tainly a remarkable trio. Southey, indeed, goes so far as to 
assert, that "no single family" ever produced three such 
poets in one generation. Giles and Phineas Fletcher were 
both clergymen. Their uncle was Bishop of London; their 
father, a man of learning and distinction, had himself pub- 
lished a volume of poems. Giles Fletcher's chief work, 
Christ's Victory and Triumph in Heaven and Earth over and 
after Death, was published in 1610. The poem is divided, 
as the title suggests, into four parts. It is written in a modi- 
fication of Spenser's stanza, and it retains "much of his 



GILES AND PHINEAS FLETCHER. 269 

melody and luxuriant expression." Giles Fletcher's master- 
piece, although now but little read, is a remarkable and in 
places a truly noble poem. Through this poem, Fletcher 
was at once the successor of Spenser and the precursor of 
Milton. On the one hand, Fletcher's description of the 
Bower of Vain Delight takes us back to Spenser's descrip- 
tion of the Bower of Bliss in the Faerie Queene, while, on the 
other hand, his account of Christ's temptation in the wil- 
derness carries us forward to Milton's treatment of the same 
theme in Paradise Regained. Fletcher's work is thus a link 
between two of the greatest poems of the literature. Phineas 
Fletcher's chief claim to be remembered rests on his singu- 
lar poem, The Purple Island; or, The Isle of Man (1633). 
This is one of those ill-advised attempts to combine science 
and poetry, and, although the work of a true poet, it suffers 
from the unpoetical nature of its subject. The Purple 
Island is not an " enchanted isle " of the imagination, but the 
human body; and the poem is an allegorical treatise on 
human anatomy and what we should now call psychology. 
Fletcher chose a pastoral setting for his w T ork, and the 
introduction of allegorical disquisitions on physiology into 
Arcadia increases the singularity of the poem. Yet there 
is genius in The Purple Island as w r ell as eccentricity and 
bad taste. In places we forget science in the charm of the 
Arcadian atmosphere, and some of the descriptions of Na- 
ture and of country life are full of quiet and beauty. One 
stanza from a description of the happiness of the shepherd's 
life, will show how charmingly Fletcher could treat a well- 
worn theme: 

"His bed of wool yields safe and quiet sleeps, 
While by his side his faithful spouse hath place: 
His little son into his bosom creeps, 
The lively picture of his father's face: 
Never his humble house or state torment him; 
Less he could like, if less his God had sent him; 
And when he dies, green turfs, with grassy tomb, content him." * 

1 The Purple Island, Canto xii. 



270 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

William Browne was a Devonshire poet, and his loosely 
constructed but often pleasing poem. Britannia s Pastorals 
(1613), contains some admirable descriptions of the beau- 
tiful scenery of his native country. At times — as in his 
description of some boys chasing a squirrel — -his pictures 
of country life are unusually spirited, fresh, and natural. 

While these Arcadian poets thus follow " Divinest Spen- 
ser" 1 looking up to him as their '' ; Colin, whom all the Graces 
_ . _ and all the Muses nurs'd " 2 others were led in a 

Joan Donne. . ; 

very different direction through the example 
of the great but eccentric poet John Doxxe (1573-1631). 
Donne was a man of intense and " highly passionate 7 ' nature, 
possessed of that abounding vitality, that capacity for 
strong emotions, which makes great saints or great sinners, 
and drives men to extremes. In his youth he showed that 
delight in action, travel, and adventure, characteristic of 
so many of the great Elizabethans. He was a hard student, 
but also a lover of pleasure. He was with Essex in 1596 
in an expedition against Spain, in which the English 
destroyed the. Spanish fleet and pillaged Cadiz. He took a 
trip to the Azores. He wandered through Spain and Italy, 
spending his fortune, it is said, in his travels and in " dear- 
bought experience." After his ret mm to England he became 
chief private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, a distin- 
guished lawyer and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, but a 
clandestine marriage with his patron's niece in 1601 ruined, 
for the time, his prospects of advancement. The marriage 
proved a happy one, but years of struggle and poverty fol- 
lowed. After much hesitation he resolved to take orders, 
and was ordained in 1615. His wife's death two years later 
appears to have wrought a great change in him. He was 
one to " contend to the uttermost for his life's set prize," and 
his thought now became concentrated upon spiritual things. 

1 Browne's tribute to Spenser in Britannia' 's Pastorate, Bk. ii. Song 1. 
5 Fletcher's Purple Island, Canto i. 



DONNE. 271 

Now that his wife was " removed by death, a commensur- 
able grief took as full a possession of him as joy had done," 
and " his very soul was elemented of nothing but sadness." * 
He held various ecclesiastical positions, and in 1621 was 
made Dean of Saint Paul's. Donne had enjoyed and suf- 
fered greatly, and that same intensity that had urged him 
into youthful excesses, helped to make him one of the great- 
est preachers England ever produced. He was, wrote 
Izaak Walton, "a preacher in earnest; weeping sometimes 
for his auditory, sometimes with them; always preaching 
to himself, like an angel from a cloud, but in none." 2 In 
these latter years he was noted for his saintliness of life, 
given to "continual study" and to good works. He died 
in 1631. 

One of the most obvious facts about Donne is the sharp 
contrast between the worldliness and impetuosity of his 

youth, and the saintliness and asceticism of his 
poetry. 8 a S e - His life is naturally divided into two 

periods, the one before and the other after his 
wife's death in 1617. Donne's poetry was almost all written 
during the first of these two periods, — probably by the 
close of the sixteenth century; in the second period he 
expressed himself chiefly through his sermons. As a 
poet, Donne is thus strictly an Elizabethan, although his 
followers belong to the reigns of James and Charles. 

Yet while Donne was a younger contemporary of the 
greatest Elizabethan poets, he was independent of them. 
He was an "innovator," and in his own generation he 
stood alone in England in his conception of poetry, and in 
his difficult, fantastic, and at times harsh and repellent 
style. Donne's style, difficult and peculiar as it seems, 
is not only similar to that of certain European poets of 
this period, it is also related to that tendency to literary 
affectations which had already shown itself in England. 
1 Walton's Life of Donne. * Walton's Life of Donne. 



272 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

Donne's singularities are in keeping with that delight in 
far-fetched comparisons and extravagant "conceits," as 
they were called, which had found expression in the eu- 
phuistic extravagances of Lyly, or in the elaborate similes 
of Sidney's Arcadia. Even the greatest Elizabethan poets 
are not free from a similar extravagance and over-ingenuity 
of expression, although the niceties of style are by no means 
their chief concern. The tendency to find an intellectual 
satisfaction in the whimsical, the abstruse, and the unex- 
pected, in verbal quibbles, and novel analogies, found its 
exponent in Donne. What the love of beauty was to 
Spenser, the love of ingenuity, the delight in intellectual 
subtility, in verbal dexterity, was to Donne. He was the 
poet of "wit." According to Dr. Johnson's famous defini- 
tion, wit consists in "a combination of dissimilar images, 
or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently 
unlike." x This ingenuity of Donne must be dwelt upon, 
because his mannerisms were imitated by certain younger 
poets, and became the distinctive feature of a group of 
poets commonly known as the "Metaphysical School." 
But it would be a great mistake to think of Donne as a 
mere master of paradoxes, or a mere intellectual gymnast. 
Donne's peculiarities, as Saintsbury justly says, obscure 
his beauty. His poems are alive with suggestion, close- 
packed with thought, and lit up by an occasional felicity 
of expression which the greatest poets hardly surpass. 

Traces of Donne's over-elaborated and often deplorable 
manner are found in the works of many of his successors. 

Such traces often seem like "the trail of the 
of D 0nn ef nCe serpent," but they sometimes produce an effect 

that is rather pleasing. One of the most notable 
of his followers was Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), whose 
great contemporary reputation was so short-lived that fifty 
years after his death his poetry was already neglected. 
1 Lives of the Poete-- " Cowley." 



THE RELIGIOUS POETS. 273 

Cowley's prose-essays, written in a pleasant and simple 
style, are a grateful contrast to the studied complexity 
that mars much of his verse. Traces of Donne are also 
obvious at times in the quaint but often beautiful religious 
poetry of George Herbert (1593-1633), Richard Crashaw 
(1613-1650?), Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), 1 and Francis 
Quarles (1592-1644). Crashaw rises at rare moments to 
great heights of beauty and eloquence, but his verse in 
general is weighed down and disfigured by "conceits." 
Herbert and Vaughan, while not free from the same ten- 
dency, write more simply, and their poems are full of sin- 
cere religious feeling. Indeed, their poetry is so tranquil, 
so lifted into the serene air of holy meditations, that it 
seems a place of sanctity in the midst of a turbulent age. 
The circumstances in which these two poets wrote were in 
keeping with the remote and unworldly atmosphere of 
their work, for Herbert was a country parson and Vaughan 
a village doctor in Wales. Herbert sprung from the younger 
branch of a distinguished family, was a courtier in his 
youth, and thought of devoting himself to a public career. 
His birth and spirit, he tells us, entangled him in a world of 
strife, and inclined him towards — 

"The way that takes the town." 3 

But, after some hesitation, he resolved to take orders. 
He was influenced at this critical period by Nicholas 
Ferrar, a retired merchant, whose peaceful and religious 
household at Little Giddings has been described by Short- 
house in John Inglesant. In 1630, Herbert became vicar 
of Bemerton, a village about a mile from Salisbury. Here 

1 Thomas Traherne (b. 1636) was another of this group. His 
work resembles that of Herbert and Vaughan, and as he was younger 
than either of those poets he presumably owed much to their example. 
His poems were recently discovered in manuscript, and first published 
in 1903. 

' Herbert's Poems : " Affliction." 



274 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE, 

he wrote his poems, and here he died three years later. 
The English country parson, immortalised by Chaucer 
and by Goldsmith, is, at his best, one of the most attrac- 
tive types of manly goodness that England has produced. 
Herbert had not the simplicity of Goldsmith's hero, for 
he had seen and known the world, but he had the good- 
ness, faithfulness, and spirituality. He was, to para- 
plirase Walton, lowly in his own eyes and lovely in the 
eyes of others, and both the beauty of his nature and the 
religious seclusion of his surroundings shine through his 
poems. "It is his quiet religion, his quaint, contem- 
plative, vicarage-garden note of thought and scholarship, 
which pleases most, and will always please, the calm piety of 
England." * Vaughan, Herbert's disciple in sacred poetry, 
fell below his master in art but surpassed him in depth 
and originality. Born in Wales of an ancient Welsh 
family, Vaughan left London shortly after 1646, and 
settled down for the rest of his life as a country doctor 
in his native Brecknockshire. Living out his secluded 
life in the quiet valley of the Usk, Vaughan saw God 
revealed not only in the services of the Church, but also in 
the living world of Nature, in the holy innocence of 
childhood, and in the "immortal longings" of his own 
spirit. He gazes on a gilded cloud or a flower, and finds 
in them some "shadows of divinity;" searching himself, 
he comes upon strange hints of man's Divine origin, he 
discovers "some rills" from the Eternal source of being, 

" With echoes beaten from the eternal hills." 3 

To Vaughan, man's life on earth is a brief exile from 
that eternal existence from which he came, and to which, 
when he rises above his temporal limitations, he longs to 
return. The light of man's spirit is a spark of the Divine 
light. 

1 Stopford Brooke: Primer of English Literature. 

8 Vaughan's Poems, "Vanity of Spirit." 



THE CAVALIER LYRISTS. 275 

** For each enclosed spirit is a star 
Enlight'ning his own little sphere; 
Whose light, though fetch'd and borrowed from far 
Both mornings makes and evenings there." 

The Retreate, Beyond the Veil, and Childhood, are among 
Vaughan's most beautiful poems. The reader will have no 
difficulty in discovering there, and in many other places in 
Vaughan's work, a striking anticipation of some of Words- 
worth's favourite ideas. 

Meanwhile at Court a group of aristocratic poets com- 
posed their slight, but often charming love-songs to Celia, 

or Lucasta. Their thoughts are given to the 
Her Lyrists, pleasures of this world as frankly as those of 

Vaughan and Herbert are centred on the next. 
Among these are Thomas Carew (1598-1639), Richard 
Lovelace (1618-1658), and Sir John Suckling (1619- 
1641). Each of these holds an assured, though minor place, 
in literature by virtue of comparatively few poems; yet 
each has contributed to it at least one lyric which has 
become a classic. Robert Herrick (1591-1674), a Devon- 
shire vicar, while he shares in the mood of these light and 
graceful amourists, rises above them in vigour and charm, 
and in the fine quality of his lyrical gift. His limpid and 
altogether charming verse is troubled by no depth of 
thought or storm of passion. The greater part of his verse 
reflects the pagan spirit of those who lie at ease in the 
warm sunshine; content to enjoy, they sigh that life is 
but a day, and lament as the lengthening shadow draws 
near. The closing verse of his poem, Corinna's going 
a-Maying, is a good example of his familiar mood: the 
inevitable chill of regret creeps into the sunshiny lyric of 
May day, and his laughter ends in a sigh: 

"Come, let us go while we are in our prime, 
And take the harmless folly of the time? 
We shall grow old apace, and die 
Before we know our liberty. 



276 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

Our life is short ; and our days run 

As fast away as does the sun; 
And as a vapour, or a drop of rain 
Once lost, can ne'er be found again: 

So when or you or I are made 

A fable, song, or fleeting shade; 

All love, all liking, all delight 

Lies drowned with us in endless night. 
Then while time serves, and we are but decaying, 
Come, my Corinna! come, let's go a-Maying." 

There is a captivating naturalness and freshness in 
Herrick's note; the rural England of his time is green for- 
ever in his verse, the hedgerows are abloom, the Maypoles 
gay with garlands. He sings 

"Of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers. 
Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers." 1 

England was racked with civil war, but neither the 
strife of religions nor the tumults in the state are able to 
shatter his Arcadia; while king and Parliament are in 
deadly grapple, Herrick sings his dainty love-songs to 
Julia and Anthea, and babbles "of green fields." 

In his youth, Herrick was one of those genial spirits 
who gathered round Ben Jonson, and in 1647, deprived 
of his living by the Puritans, he left Devonshire and 
returned to London. In 1648 he published a book of 
poems, " both Humane and Divine," containing the 
Hesperides and The Noble Numbers. For even Herrick 
wrote what he styled " pious pieces," and a few of these 
are very quaint and charming. In one of them, he 
laments the license of his verse, and asks forgiveness for 
his "unbaptized rhymes." But it is not likely that his 
penitential moods were very deep or lasting. His natural 
temper seems to have been light and earthly. Enjoy 
your May-day, gather your rose-buds, "Let's now take 
our time ; " such were the gay songs he flung defiantly in 
the face of sober, Puritan England. 

1 Hesperides. 



MILTON. 277 

In the midst of this poetry of self-indulgence there rose 
the mighty voice of Milton. In Lycidas, which may be 

said to conclude the poems of his earlier period, 
Milton. a Milton, too, asks the pagan question, "Seeing 

that life is short, is it not better to enjoy? " 
but only to meet it with triumphant denial. This famous 
passage becomes of especial interest when we think that 
it was probably written with such poets as Carew and 
Herrick in mind; when we recognise in it the high 
seriousness and religious faith of Puritanism, squarely 
confronting the nation's lighter mood: 

"Alas I what boots it with uncessant care 
To tend the homely, slighted, shepherd's trade, 
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? 
Were it not better done, as others use, 
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, 
Or with the tangles of Neasra's hair? 
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 
(That last infirmity of noble mind) 
To scorn delights, and live laborious days; 
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, 
And think to burst out into sudden blaze, 
Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears, 
And slits the thin-spun life. 'But not the praise/ 
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears: 
'Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, 
Nor in the glistering foil 
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies, 
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes 
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove; 
As he pronounces lastly on each deed, 
Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed." * 

1 Lycidas, ii. 64-84. 



278 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

JOHN MILTON. 

(1608-1674.) 

"Three poets, in three distant ages born, 
Greece, Italy, and England, did adorn. 
The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd ; 
The next in majesty; in both the last. 
The force of Nature could no further go ; 
To make a third, she join'd the former two." 



Dryden. 



"Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart: 
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: 
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 
So didst thou travel on life's common way 
In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 
The lowliest duties on herself did lay." 

— Wordsworth. 

"... He died, 
Who was the sire of an immortal strain, 
Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride 
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide 
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite 
Of lust and blood ; he went, unterrified, 
Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite 
Yet reigns o'er earth, the third among the sons of light." 

— Shelley. 

"His sympathies with things are much narrower than Shakespeare's 
Shakespeare was not polemical: Milton was polemical altogether." 

— Carlyle. 

"An appreciation of Milton is the last reward of consummated 
scholarship." — Mark Patttson. 

"God-gifted organ voice of England." 

— Tennyson. 

Shakespeare, the poet of man, was born in rural Eng- 
land; John Milton, into whose remote and lofty verse 
humanity enters so little, was born in Bread Street in the 
heart of London, December 9, 1608. 

His early years were passed in a sober and orderly 
Puritan household among influences of refinement and 



MILTON. 279 

culture. His father, John Milton, was a scrivener, an 
Boyhood at occupation somewhat corresponding to the mod- 
London, ern conveyancer, but he was also well known 

lfi08— lfi24 

' as a musical composer. The younger Milton's 
faculty for music had thus an opportunity for early 
development; a fact of especial interest when we recall 
the distinctively musical character of his verse. 

Milton was early destined " for the study of humane let- 
ters," and given every educational advantage. He had 
private instruction, and about 1620 was sent to the famous 
Grammar School of St. Paul. Here, to use his own ex- 
pression, he worked "with eagerness," laying the founda- 
tion of his future blindness by intense application. He 
began to experiment in poetry, and we have paraphrases 
of two of the Psalms made by him at this time. 

In 1624 Milton entered Christ's College, Cambridge, where 
he continued to work with the same steady and regulated 
enthusiasm. His youth was spotless and high- 
162^5(332 minded, with perhaps a touch of that austerity 
which deepened as he grew older. His face had 
an exquisitely refined and thoughtful beauty; his soft light- 
brown hair fell to his shoulders after the Cavalier fashion; 
his figure was well-knit but slender; his complexion, "ex- 
ceeding fair." From his somewhat delicate beauty, and 
from his blameless life, he gained the college nickname of 
" the Lady." The year after he entered college he wrote 
his first original poem, On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying 
of a Cough, and to this period also belong the resonant 
Hymn to the Nativity and other short pieces. 

After leaving Cambridge Milton spent nearly six years 

at his father's country house at Horton, a village near 

Windsor, and about seventeen miles from 

1632^1638 London. Here he lived with books and Nature, 

studying the classics and physical science, and 

baving his studious quiet only for an occasional trip 



280 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

to town to learn something new in music or in mathe- 
matics. 

Milton's L' 'Allegro and II Penseroso, composed at this 
time, reflect both the young poet and his surroundings. 
L' Allegro Rustic life and superstitions are there blended 
and with idyllic pictures of the Horton landscape, 

enseroso. j^ Jj Allegro we hear the ploughman whistle at 
his furrow, the milkmaid sing at her work; we see the 

"Meadows trim, with daisies pied, 
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide," 

or mark the neighbouring towers of Windsor 

"Bosomed high in tufted trees." 

In both poems we detect Milton himself, a refined and seri- 
ous nature, exquisitely responsive to whatever is best in 
life, with a quick and by no means narrow appreciation of 
things beautiful. The poems suggest to us a youthful 
Milton dreaming of gorgeous and visionary splendours in 
the long summer twilights, delighting in the plays of Jonson 
and Shakespeare, and spending lonely midnights in the 
loftiest speculations of philosophy; a Milton whose beauty- 
loving and religious nature w T as moved by the solemn ritual 
of the Church of England under the "high embowed roof" 
of a cathedral. In these poems, especially U Allegro, Mil- 
ton is very close to the Elizabethans. In their tinge of 
romance they remind us of Spenser, who, according to 
Masson, was Milton's poetical master, while in their lyrical 
movement the} r strikingly resemble certain songs of Fletcher 
in his pastoral drama, The Faithful Shepherdess. 1 But 
c Comus (1634), Milton's next work, shows the 

decided growth of a new and distinctly Puritan 
spirit. In its form indeed, Comus belongs to the earlier 

1 See the beautiful lyric, "Shepherds All and Maidens Fair," in 
Act ii. Sc. 1, and "Song of the River God," in Act iii. Sc. 1, of this 
play. 



MILTON. 281 

age. It is a mask — one of those gorgeous dramatic spec- 
tacles which Renaissance England had learned from Italy, 
the favourite entertainment at the festivals of the rich, 
with which Ben Jonson so often delighted the court of 
James. Comus has music and dancing, and it affords the 
requisite opportunity for scenic effects, yet there breathes 
through it the growing strain of moral earnestness. It 
shows us how purity and innocence can thread the darkest 
and most tangled ways of earth, unharmed and invincible, 
through the inherent might of goodness. In noble and 
memorable words Milton declares that if we once lose faith 
in this essential power of righteousness, and in the ultimate 
triumph of good over evil which that power is destined to 
secure, the very foundations of the universe give way : 

"... Against the threats 
Of malice or of sorcery, or that power 
Which erring men call Chance, this I hold firm : 
Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt, 
Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled: 
Yea, even that which Mischief meant most harm 
Shall in the happy trial prove most glory. 
But evil on itself shall back recoil, 
And mix no more with goodness, when at last, 
Gathered like scum, and settled to itself, 
It shall be in eternal restless change 
Self-fed and self-consumed. If this fail, 
The pillared firmament is rottenness, 
And earth's base built on stubble." * 

We see the powers of Heaven descend to protect be- 
leaguered innocence, and in the parting words of the attend- 
ant spirit, we find both the practical lesson of the mask and 
the guiding principle of Milton: 

"Mortals, that would follow me, 
Love Virtue ; she alone is free. 
She can teach ye how to climb 
Higher than the sphery chime; 
Or s if Virtue feeble were, 
Heaven itself would stoop to her." l 

1 Comus. 



282 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

In his next poem, the pastoral elegy of Lycidas (1637), 

the space between Milton and the Elizabethans continues 

T ., to widen. From the enthusiasm for virtue, he 

Lycidas. ' . 

passes to an outburst of wrath and denuncia- 
tion against those in the Church whom he considered the 
faithless shepherds of the flock. 

"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed," 
but the hour of retribution is at hand; already the 

"two-handed engine at the door, 
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more." * 

The first thirty years of Milton's life had thus been lived 
almost wholly "in the still air of delightful studies." 2 In- 
Travels, dustrious and select reading was part of his 

1638-1639. systematic preparation for the life-work he set 
himself. Up to this time he wrote little, although 
that little was- enough to give him an honourable place 
among the poets of England; but already he was full of great 
designs, writing in 1637, "I am pluming my wings for a 
flight." To all he had learned from books he now added 
the widening influences of travel. 

Leaving England in April, 1638, he passed through Paris 
to Italy, meeting many learned and famous men, among 
the rest the old astronomer Galileo, to whom he refers in 
the early part of Paradise Lost. 

Meanwhile the civil troubles in England seemed gathering 
to a crisis, and Milton resolved to shorten his trip, because, 
as he wrote, "I considered it base that while my fellow- 
countrymen were fighting at home for liberty, I should be 
travelling abroad for intellectual culture." 

1 Lycidas. For full analysis of this passage see Ruskin's Sesame 
and Lilies. 

8 Milton, The Reason of Church Government, Into, Bk. ii„ 



MILTON. 283 

We learn from the Epitaphium Damonis, a beautiful 

Latin elegy written at this time (1639), that Milton was 

already planning a great epic poem, but this 

England, and project was to be rudely interrupted. England 

S"^' was on the brink of civil war, and after long 

1639—1660. . .„. • i i • i 

years of preparation Milton put aside his cher- 
ished ambitions and pursuits, and freely gave up his life 
and genius to the service of his country. Except for occa- 
sional sonnets, the greatest poet in England forced himself 
to write prose for more than twenty years. Most of this 
prose was written in the heat of "hoarse disputes," and 
is often marred by the bitterness and personal abuse which 
marked the controversies of that troubled time; but this 
is redeemed in many places by earnestness and a noble 
eloquence. 

Prominent among the works of this prose period are the 
Tractate on Education (1644), and the splendid Areopagi- 
tica, a burning plea for the liberty of the press, of which it 
has been said: "Its defence of books, and the freedom of 
books, will last as long as there are writers and readers of 
books." x 

Meanwhile (1643), Milton had taken a hasty and unfor- 
tunate step in marrying Mary Powell, a young girl of less 
than half his age, of Royalist family, who proved unsuited 
to him in disposition and education. After the execution 
of Charles I. (1649) Milton ranged himself on the side of 
those who had taken this tremendous step, in a pamphlet 
on The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and a month 
after its publication, was made the Latin, or foreign, Secre- 
tary to the newly established Commonwealth. His pen 
continued to be busy for the state, until in 1652 his eyes 
failed him through over-use, and he was stricken with total 
blindness. In this year his wife died, leaving him with 
three little girls. In 1656 he married Katherine Wood- 
1 Stopford Brooke, Milton, p. 45, Classical Writers Series. 



284 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

cock, who lived but little more than a year, and to whom 
he paid a touching tribute in one of his sonnets. * 

In these later years of Milton's life, during which he 
suffered blindness, sorrow, and broken health, the cause 
The later ^ or wrncn ne na d sacrificed so much was lost, 
poetic period and England brought again under the rule of a 
1660- . g^ uar £ king. Milton had been so vehement an 
advocate of the Parliament that we wonder at his escape; 
but, from whatever reason, he was not excepted from the 
general pardon put forth by Charles II. after his return 
(August 29, 1660). In the riotous years that followed, 
when England, casting off decency and restraint, plunged 
into "the mad orgy of the Restoration," Milton entered in 
earnest upon the composition of Paradise Lost, singing 
with voice 

" unchanged 
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days; 
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, 
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, 
And solitude." 2 

In his little house in Bunhill Fields, near the London in 
which the pleasure-loving king jested at faith and honour, 
and held his shameless court amid 

"... the barbarous dissonance 
Of Bacchus and his revellers/' 3 

the old poet lived his life of high contemplation and un- 
daunted labour. At no time does Milton seem to us more 
worthy of himself; he is so heroic that we hardly dare to 
pity him. But wherever the fault lay, his daughters, 
whose privilege it should have been to minister to him, 
greatly increased his burdens. They are said to have sold 

1 "Methought I saw my late espoused Saint 

Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave," etc. 
* Paradise Lost, Bk. vii. s Paradise Lost, Book vii. 



MILTON. 285 

his books without his knowledge, and two of them coun- 
selled his maidservant to "cheat him in his marketings." 

When we reflect that the oldest daughter was but four- 
teen at the Restoration, and that the education of all had 
been neglected, we are inclined to judge less hardly, but 
we can scarcely wonder that Milton should have sought 
some means of relief from these intolerable discomforts. 
This he happily found through his marriage with Elizabeth 
Minshull in 1663. Yet even when matters were at the 
worst, Milton seems to have borne them with a beautiful 
fortitude, "having a certain serenity of mind not conde- 
scending to little things." His one faithful daughter, 
Deborah, speaks of his cheerfulness under his sufferings 
from the gout, and describes him as " the soul of conversa- 
tion." In the spirit of his sonnet "On His Blindness," 
he was content to "only stand and wait," sending up the 
prayer out of his darkness, 

"So much the rather thou, Celestial Light, 
Shine inward." l 

The words of one who visited him at this time help to 
bring Milton before us, dressed neatly in black, and seated 
in a large arm-chair in a room with dark-green hangings, 
his soft hair falling over his shoulders, his sightless eyes 
still beautiful and clear. 

Paradise Lost was published in 1667, to be followed 
in 1671 by Paradise Regained. With the latter poem 
appeared the noble drama of Samson Agonistes (or the 
Wrestler), and with it Milton's work was ended. He died 
on November 8, 1674, so quietly that those with him 
knew not when he passed away. 

"Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, 
Dispraise, or blame; nothing but well and fair, 
And what may quiet us in a death so noble." 2 

1 Paradise Lost, Bk. iii. ' Samson Agonistes, 1„ 1721. 



286 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

We are stimulated and thrilled by the thought of 
Milton's life, as at the sight of some noble and heroic 

action. Obviously it is not free from our 
of Me S * ea common human shortcomings, but in its whole 

ideal and in its large results, we feel that it 
moves habitually on the higher levels, and is animated by 
no vulgar or ordinary aims. It is much that as a great 
poet [Milton loved beauty, that as a great scholar he 
sought after truth. It is more that, above the scholar's 
devotion to knowledge, Milton set the citizen's devotion 
to country, the patriot's passionate love of liberty: that 
above even the employment of his great poetic gift, he 
set the high resolve to make his life "a true poem," and 
to live 

"As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye." l 

He has accordingly left us an example of solemn self- 
consecration to a lofty purpose, early undertaken, and 

steadfastly and consistently pursued. Milton's life was 
lived at higli tension; he not only set an exacting stand- 
ard for himself, he was also inclined to impose it upon 
others. He is so sublime that some of us are inclined 
to be a trifle ill at ease in his presence, or are apt to be 
repelled by a strain of severity far different from the 
sweet companionableness of Shakespeare. In Milton's 
stringent and austere ideal we miss at times the saving 
grace of Shakespeare's charity, or we are ahnost moved 
to exclaim with Sir Toby: 

"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no 
more cakes and ale?" 3 

In Samson Agonistes, when Delilah pleads before her 

1 Sonnet "On his Arriving at the Age of Twenty-three." 
3 Twelfth Night, Act ii. Sc. 3. 



MILTON. 287 

husband that she has sinned through weakness, she is 
met by an uncompromising reply: 

"... If weakness may excuse, 
What murderer, what traitor, parricide, 
Incestuous, sacrilegious, but may plead it? 
All wickedness is weakness: that plea, therefore, 
With God or man will gain thee no remission." l 

From such a rigorous insistence on condemnation in 
strict accord with the offence, our minds revert to Portia's 
inspired plea for mercy, 2 or to Isabella's searching question : 

"How would you be, 
If He, which is the top of judgment, should 
But judge you as you are?" 3 

However we may appreciate these differences in the 
spirit of two great poets, we do Milton wrong if we fail to 

honour and reverence him for that in which he 
Lost. ' was supremely great. We must remember that 

this intense zeal for righteousness was a master 
passion in the highest spirits of Milton's time, and that 
it is hard to combine zeal with tolerance. It is but natural 
that in the midst of the corrupt England of the Restora- 
tion, the almost solitary voice of the nation's better self 
could not prophesy smooth things. This Puritan severity 
is especially marked in the three great poems of Milton's 
later life. As a young man he had chosen a purely roman- 
tic subject for his projected epic — the story of Arthur; 
his maturer interests led him to abandon this for a purely 
religious and doctrinal one; he treated of the fall of man 
and the origin of evil, that he might " justify the ways of 
God to men." Paradise Lost, with its sequel, Paradise 
Regained, constitutes the one great contribution of the 
English genius to the epic poetry of the world. The style 
of these great works alone shows genius of the highest 

1 Samson Agonistes, 1. 831. 2 V. supra, p. 243. 

3 Measure for Measure, Act ii. Sc. 2. 



288 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

and rarest kind. By the incomparable dignity and 
majesty of the verse, with its prolonged and solemn music, 
and the curious involution of its slowly unfolding sen- 
tences, we are lifted out of the ordinary or the trivial, into 
the incalculable spaces of that region into which it is the 
poet's object to transport us. In Paradise Lost, caught in 
the tremendous sweep of Milton's imagination, we see 
our whole universe, with its circling sun and planets hang- 
ing suspended in the black abyss of chaos, 

"In bigness like a star." 

Heaven, "the deep tract of Hell," and that illimitable 
and chaotic region which lies between, make up the vast 
Miltonic background, where legions of rebellious angels 
strive with God, and wherein is enacted the mysterious 
drama, not of men, but of the race of Man. 

The attitude of Shakespeare toward that unseen and 
mysterious region which lies beyond the limits of our human 
experience, was that of the new learning. He 
Shakespeare. Pl aces us m the niidst of our familiar world, 
and there we only catch at times the half-intelli- 
gible whisper of voices coming out of those blank surround- 
ing spaces which no man can enter. Hamlet, slipping out of 
this little earthly circle of noise and light, can but whisper 
on the brink of the great blackness of darkness, that 

"The rest is silence." 

But Milton, with the new daring of Puritanism, took for 
his province that "undiscovered country" beyond the 
walls of this goodly prison, as Shakespeare, through 
Hamlet, called the world. At the beginning of his great 
epic he invokes " The Heavenly Muse," 

"that on the secret top 
Of Oreb or of Sinai, didst inspire, 
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed, 
In the beginning how the heavens and earth 
Rose out of chaos." l 

1 Paradise Lost. Bk. L 



SEVENTEENTH CENTURY PROSE. 289 

He looks to the Hill of Sion, 

"and Siloa's brook, that flowed 
Fast by the oracle of God," x 

rather than to Parnassus, and by Celestial guidance 
intends to soar " above the Aonian mount, " and to 
pursue 

"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." * 

Seventeenth-Century Prose. 

Our study of Milton has carried us beyond the date of 
the Restoration, but before we leave Elizabethans and 
Puritans, and enter that new England which began with 
the return of Charles II., we must turn back to the open- 
ing of the seventeenth century, and note some salient 
features in the history of prose. While the deep emo- 
tions, high imaginations, and poetic fancy which possessed 
Renaissance England, found their fullest and their earliest 
expression through poetry and the drama, from the close 
of the sixteenth century they began to ennoble prose also. 
We have already noted the beginning of a more sustained 
and majestic prose-style in Hooker; we must now glance 
at the further development of prose in the hands of some of 
his greatest and most representative successors. Raleigh's 
History of the World (1614), tedious and discursive as it 
is, is illuminated by many noble and poetic passages. 
Raleigh had known the world as few men know it, its 
ambitions, its rivalries, its heroism, its splendid successes, 
its cruel humiliations and defeats, and — imprisoned in 
the Tower at the close of his life, crowded with great ex- 
ploits — he undertook to write a survey of the course of 
1 Paradise Lost, Bk. i. 



290 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

human history. When we put aside all that seems pedan- 
tic or absurd in Raleigh's History, when we pass beyond 
the parade of a now antiquated learning, and reach the 
heart of his book, we see that it is the verdict on human 
life pronounced by a man who had known life well. Shut 
out at last from an active share in the world's life, Raleigh, 
the courtier, the soldier, the statesman, the colonist, the 
freebooter, the explorer, the poet, the philosopher, sits 
down at last in quiet, and asks what does this world mean, 
and what is its worth. The book, useless or ridiculous as 
history, is memorable as the personal revelation of a 
restless and splendid personality. It has the deep religious 
feeling and the deep melancholy of the English nation: it 
begins with a noble apostrophe to God, "The Almighty 
Mover" who "has been pleased to make himself known by 
the work of the world," and it ends with that passage 
on the emptiness of earthly ambitions, that tribute to 
Death the Conqueror, which is one of the glories of Eng- 
lish prose: "P eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom 
none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath 
dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flat- 
tered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. 
Thou hast drawn together all the far stretched greatness, 
all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered 
it all over with these two narrow words, Hie jacet! " 

In such passages, and others which fall but little short 
of this high level, we see how in the seventeenth century 
the passion and poetry of the Elizabethans shone out 
through the less transparent medium of prose. Jeremy 
Taylor (1613-1667), called by Coleridge the "most elo- 
quent of English divines," was one of the greatest masters of 
this poetic, or impassioned prose. Read, for instance, this 
passage on the shortness of man's life, and see how he in- 
vests a familiar comparison with freshness and beauty, 
creating out of old materials a prose-poem not unworthy 



SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE. 291 

to stand beside many a familiar lyric on the same theme. 1 
" But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts 
of its hood, and, at first, it was fair as the morning, and full 
with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece; but when a 
ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dis- 
mantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to 
put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symp- 
toms of a sickly age; it bowed the head and broke its stalk; 
and, at night, having lost. some of its leaves and all its 
beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces. 
The same is the portion of every man and every woman." 2 
There was also a quaint scholastic air in some of the sev- 
enteenth-century prose-writers, analogous to the extrava- 
gances of Donne or his followers in verse. This musty 
flavour of odd learning permeates the Anatomy oj Melan- 
choly (1621) of Robert Burton (1577-1640), and enters 
into the fascinating style of Sir Thomas Browne (1605- 
1682). Burton, "that fantastic great old man," as Charles 
Lamb called him, spent the greater portion of his life in the 
studious seclusion of Oxford. Many, we are told, "ac- 
counted" him "a severe student, a devourer of authors, a 
melancholy and humorous person." 3 His Anatomy (or 
analysis) of Melancholy, heavily freighted with the spoils of 
his wide and curious reading, impresses us as an unconscious 
revelation of the humorous personality of the man. Sir 

1 Many of these lyrics, however, urge that, — life being short, — we 
should gather rosebuds while we may. Many examples will occur to 
the reader: Herrick's To the Virgins to make much of Time, and 
To Daffodils ; Waller's Go, lovely Rose ; Spenser's song (translated 
from Tasso) in the Faerie Queene, Bk. ii. Canto xii. ("Ah, see the 
Virgin Rose, how sweetly she," etc.), and Giles Fletcher's variation 
of Spenser's Song in Christ's Triumph on Earth. Cf. also Ausonius' 
"De Rosis Nascentibus," 11. 49-50, and Ronsard's A Cassandre 
(Mignonne, allons voir si la rose, etc.). Taylor naturally uses the com- 
parison to point an orthodox moral. Cf. the various biblical passages 
in which man's life is compared to a "flower," "grass," etc. 

* The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, chap. i. § ii. 

* Anthony a Wood : Athence Oxonienses. 



292 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

Thomas Browne's style, like Burton's, is that of an old-tirae 

scholar, full of recondite allusions and fragments from the 
classics, but it mounts into loftier regions of poetry and 

imagination. Browne was a learned and busy physi: 
who. after taking his degree abroad, settled down at Nor- 
wich in 1637. to the practice of his profession. He loved 
to investigate the odd and the mysterious, and delighted 
in curious speculations. He ~as a scientist, but be was 
above all a poet and a mystic. The ostensible object of 
his F -_ Mo Vulgar and Common Errors (1643 is to 

dispel certain popular superstition- by the light of reason 
common sense, but his real interest is with the things 
which never can be proved. To him there are not " im- 
possibilities enough in religion for an active faith.*" "I 
love. " he writes, '"to lose myself in a mystery : t : pursue my 
reason to an aUift :':!"' Browne's first book, ReKgio 
Media 1642-1643 . shows a detachment from the present 
and the temporal, a nearness to the unseen, which strongly 
reminds us of Vaughan. He counts the world n:t an inn 
but an hospital, and a place not to live but to die in."' 
He loses himself in the contemplation of God, and in bis 
u solitary and retired imaginations"* he remembers that he 
is not alone. Like Vaughan he finds a divine spark in his 
own nature : " There is surely a piece of divinity in us — 
something that was before the heavens and owes no hom- 
age unto the sun." 1 This mystical exaltation is united 
with a quiet, contemplative melancholy. He surveys the 
world as from a height ; he sees the pas - in a I : ng retrospect, 
and he speculates upon the endless procession of genera- 
tions. He meditates on death and on the lire after death, 
and even the burial rites of various nations and the visible 
signs of mortality have an interest for dim. The discovery 
of some ancient sepulchral urns containing human bones, 
in a field in Norfolk, stirs his imagination, and furnishes 

1 Re.icio Medici, 



SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE. 293 

him with a theme for his Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, one 
of the most eloquent and characteristic of his works. The 
thought of "these dead bones" hid a yard underground in 
their "thin walls of clay," and quietly resting "under the 
drums and tramplings of three conquests," is the inspira- 
tion of one of the noblest passages of English prose. 1 The 
Urn Burial was published in 1658, the year of the death of 
Oliver Cromwell. But if from one aspect Browne seems re- 
mote and withdrawn from the agitations of his time, from 
another he is as truly the spokesman of its lofty spirituality 
and melancholy contemplation. He wrote when the vig- 
orous, mimdane activity of the Elizabethan era had been 
succeeded by a more mature and meditative mood. This 
solemn tone, like the stillness of an autumn twilight after 
a day of action, pervades some of the noblest spirits of his 
age. It was in Raleigh when he wrote his History of the 
World; it was in Donne, when, after his fevered and pas- 
sionate youth, he preached and meditated on death and 
the hereafter. Indeed, there are passages in Donne's ser- 
mons which might well have been written by Browne. 
AVhen we look deeply, we see that Vaughan in his Welsh 
village, Herbert at Bemerton, Nicholas Ferrar at Little 
Giddings, and Browne at Norfolk, were in spirit not far 
apart. 

The seventeenth century was a memorable one in prose, 
but we must confine ourselves to a passing mention of some 

of the most notable names. Thomas Fuller 
JSSST" 6 " (1608-1661), a genial, shrewd, and delightfully 

humorous author, wrote, among many other 
books, a Church History of Britain (1656), and a fascinating 
book on The Worthies of England (1662). Lord Claren- 
don's History of the Great Rebellion (after 1660), the work 
of a great actor in the events he describes, is written with 
vigour and vividness, and a certain stateliness and dignity 

1 Hydriotaphia, chap. v. 



294 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

of style. Before Clarendon set clown his impressions of 
the great struggle of the century, Izaak Walton (1593- 
1683), a London linen-draper, had found in country 
scenes and by the borders of a quiet stream, inspiration of 
a widely different character. Walton's kindly, unworldly 
nature, his quiet goodness, his simple pleasure in Nature 
and in country sports, shine through his books and make 
him one of the most restful, and companionable of writers. 
His Lives, short, sympathetic sketches of Donne, Hooker, 
Herbert, and other notable men, while not always free 
from partiality, are in other respects models of brief biog- 
raphy. His Complete Angler (1653) is so wholesome, so 
full of wise thoughts and innocent enjoyment, so idyllic 
in its country atmosphere, that it has long held a secure 
place among the masterpieces of English prose. 

Finally, we must not forget that Milton, whose work 
has been already alluded to, holds a high, perhaps the 
highest, place among the prose-writers of this time. 
Many of Milton's prose-works deal with the theological 
or political * controversies of his day. They were ad- 
dressed primarily to the men of his own generation; 
written to gain some immediate and definite result. Works 
of this character inevitably lose something of their vital- 
ity by the mere lapse of time; for future generations, busy 
with their own problems, are apt to take but a languid 
interest in these dead issues of the past. Yet, in at least 
some of his prose, such as the immortal Areopagitica, 
Milton's greatness, his passion for truth and liberty, his 
comprehensive scholarship, his sonorous, majestic, and 
subtly-musical style, his instinct for the felicitous and 
memorable phrase, triumph over anything that is temporal 
in his subject and purpose, and a work addressed to his 
own age becomes the delight and admiration of later times. 



BUNYAN. 295 

JOHN BUNYAN. 

(1628-1688.) 

"Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished 
longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and 
The Pilgrim's Progress"? — Dr. Samuel Johnson. 

"Ingenious dreamer! in whose well-told tale 
Sweet fiction and sweet truth alike prevail; 
Whose humourous vein, strong sense, and simple style, 
May teach the gayest, make the gravest smile; 
Witty, and well employed, and, like thy Lord, 
Speaking in parables his slighted word, " 

— Cowper. 

"We are not afraid to say, that, though there were many clever 
men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, 
there were only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty 
in a very eminent degree. One of those minds produced the Paradise 
Lost, the other the Pilgrim's Progress." — Lord Macaulay. 

Raleigh, Browne, Burton, Milton, and many other great 
prose-writers of the seventeenth century, were children of 
the Revival of Learning. It is true that they were im- 
bued with the religious, serious, or meditative spirit preva- 
lent in their own time, but they had been trained up and 
steeped in those classical studies which had come in with 
the Renaissance, and their works were the outcome of the 
new culture. 

Bunyan's spiritual inheritance was a mighty but a 
restricted one. He " never went to school to Aristotle 
Btmyanthe an( ^ Plato;" * he had no share in that world of 
child of the classical culture, of art and beauty, which had 
B,eformatlon ' enriched the lives of so many of the greatest 
Elizabethans. He was not the child of the New Learn- 
ing, but of the Reformation; the child of that long period 
of religious struggle and experience, which began when 
the plain, unlit erary people of England — the shop- 
Keepers, artisans, and plowmen — could first read the Bible 

1 Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded : Epistle to the Reader. 



296 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

for themselves. A few years before the publication of 
Pilgrim's Progress, Milton had put the doctrine and the 
spirit of Puritanism into his great epic, but Milton had the 
varied scholarship and the beauty-loving temperament 
that marked the men of the Renaissance. He was master 
of almost every language and every literature then known 
to European scholars; he was literally "the heir of all the 
ages/' and he made royal use of his vast inheritance. 
But Bunyan sprang from and belonged to the great mass 
of the people. His father was of "that rank which is 
meanest and most despised of all the families of the land. " * 
While Milton had all; Bunyan had only the torments of 
his strange spiritual conflict, the enforced leisure of his 
long imprisonment, his genius, and the English Bible. 
And it is the comparative narrowness of Bunyan's inher- 
itance, the obscurit}^ of his station, the commonplace 
character of his surroundings, that make him, more truly 
than the cultured Milton, the representative of the great 
body of English Puritans, — of the earnest, simple- 
minded men and women who had no library but the 
English Bible, and to whom religion was a vital and ab- 
sorbing reality. 

John Bunyan was born on the outskirts of Elstow, a 

village about a mile from Bedford, in 1628. His father 

was a brazier, or tinker, a patcher of old cans 

or kettles, — and Bunyan was bred to the 

same humble calling. There was nothing exceptional in 

his situation, or especially striking in his surroundings. 

He was a poor man's child in an English village, " brought 

up . . . in a very mean condition, among a company of poor 

countrymen." The country about Elstow is restful and 

pleasing, rather than bold or romantic; near by, the river 

Ouse flows tranquilly through broad stretches of flat and 

open meadows. The land is fertile. It is a place where 

1 Grace Abounding. 



BUNYAN. 297 

one would expect to find comfort, dulness, and content. 
Bunyan was given some elementary instruction, but he 
afterwards forgot most of the little he had ever learned. 
When he was in his seventeenth year he served for a short 
time in the Parliamentary army (1644-1647). But at the 
close of the Civil War, after this experience of the world 
outside his village, he returned to Elstow, married a 
woman as poor as himself, and began a life apparently 
destined to be undisturbed, monotonous, and respectable. 
Bunyan was no pale, hysterical fanatic, no weakling, no 
over-wrought student; he was a sturdy, big-boned, florid- 
faced, English tinker, every inch a man, yet there was 
something in him that set him apart from his neighbours. 
In the midst of those peaceful, commonplace surround- 
ings, he was tortured by a sense of his own wickedness, by 
doubts, by temptations to utter terrible blasphemies, by 
despair. Living, to all outward appearance, the most 
ordinary of lives, Bunyan's soul became the battlefield of 
that fierce conflict which he has himself described in 
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. This book is the 
autobiography of a man's spirit. No one can read it 
without feeling that the foundation of Bunyan's character, 
as well as the chief source of his power, is his intense and 
direct relation to the unseen. We cannot explain this; 
but as truly as Napoleon had a genius for war, or Watt 
for scientific invention, Bunyan, like Dante or St. Francis 
of Assisi, had a genius for religion, and things which to 
others seem vague and remote, were to him immediate 
and sometimes terrible realities. As a child he had been 
affected with fearful dreams and terrible visions. Once, 
when he was nine or ten years old, an awful despair over- 
came him in the midst of his play. As he grew older these 
visions left him, until that strange conflict began within him 
not long after his return to Elstow. This spiritual conflict 
lasted about four years. Once when he was playing tip-cat, 



298 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

a voice from heaven darted suddenly into his soul, asking 
him if he would leave his sins. Burdened with a sense of 
his guilt, he gave up his favourite amusements one by one. 
He gave up the delight of ringing the bells in the church- 
tower: he gave up dancing on the village green. But 
Bunyan, though given to swearing in his youth, had never 
been what the ordinary man would call wicked. His 
struggle was not the ordinary battle with the grosser temp- 
tations ; what he desired was not outward respectability, not 
outward conformity to the conventional standards of those 
about him, it was a state of inward certainty and peace. 
He was "in a flame to find the way to heaven/' but for 
him the way seemed barred. One day he sat down on a 
settle in the street of a neighbouring town and brooded upon 
his condition. "I lifted up my head," he writes, "but 
methought I saw, as if the sun that shineth in the heavens 
did grudge to give light; and as if the stones in the streets, 
and the tiles upon the houses, did bend themselves against 
me. Methought they all combined together to banish 
me out of the world." 

To men of a colder and more materialistic temperament, 
this violence of emotion seems merely morbid, unnecessary, 
or absurd. It is as incomprehensible to them as the rap- 
tures of a poet to one whose nature is hopelessly prosaic 
and matter-of-fact. But to understand Bunyan, or his 
greatest book, we must follow him through the agonies of 
his spiritual experiences, with sympathy and imagination. 
We must realise that in those years of inward torment 
Bunyan — poor, narrow-minded, perplexed, but magnifi- 
cently and utterly in earnest — was making his own painful 
pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to a City of Peace. 

At last he found it. In 1653 he joined a little commu- 
nity of dissenters, presided over by a certain John Gifford, 
and after a time he began to preach. After the Restora- 
tion he was arrested for preaching in unlicensed convent- 



BUNYAN. 299 

icles and thrown into the Bedford gaol. He refused to 
make the promise to give up preaching which would have 
given him liberty. "If you let me out to-day," he said, 
"I will preach again to-morrow." He remained in the 
gaol for eleven years, supporting himself by making " long- 
tagged thread laces," preaching to his fellow-prisoners, 
and writing Grace Abounding and several other books. In 
1672 the Declaration of Indulgence was passed, an act 
granting religious liberty both to Roman Catholics and 
Nonconformists, and Bunyan was released. But three 
years later on the repeal of this act, Bunyan, who had re- 
sumed his preaching, was again imprisoned. It was during 
this second imprisonment, which lasted three years, that 
he began to write Pilgrim's Progress. The first part of 
this marvellous book was published in a cheap and unos- 
tentatious form in 1678, the same year which saw the 
appearance of the great John Dryden's tragedy on the 
story of Antony and Cleopatra, entitled, All for Love 
and the World Well Lost. 

Bunyan wrote many other books after this ; The second 
part of the Pilgrim's Progress, The Life and Death of Mr. 
Badman, and The Holy War, the last of which Macaulay 
declared to be, Pilgrim's Progress alone excepted, "the 
best allegory that ever was written." In these last years 
Bunyan rose to great influence among those of his own 
sect, and was popularly called "Bishop Bunyan." In 
1688 exposure to a rain-storm while he was engaged in a 
work of mercy, resulted in a sudden illness, and he died in 
a few days: 

The popularity of the Pilgrim's Progress was long con- 
fined to readers of the lower and middle classes. It was 
written for the people by a man of the people. 
Progress™' 8 ^ was written by a dissenter at a time when 
dissenters were persecuted and despised, and its 
distinctly religious purpose, as well as the humble station 



300 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

of its author, combined to place it outside the conventional 
bounds of literature. The polite world disdained it; the 
critics ignored it, or failed to take it seriously. But in the 
course of a hundred years the power of the book began to 
impress the literary and fashionable classes, and when 
Macaulay wrote his sketch of Bunyan in 1854, the "edu- 
cated minority" had "come over to the opinion of the 
common people." 1 To-day the fame of Bunyan's master- 
piece is probably greater than it has ever been before. It 
has been translated into many foreign languages, and it 
stands with those few supreme books which, like Robinson 
Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, remain the delight and admi- 
ration of the high and the low, the young and the old, the 
ignorant and the cultured. What is there in the unpre- 
tentious work of "the inspired tinker" that has obtained 
for it the permanence and the universality of the great 
classics? 

In the first place, Bunyan, sectarian as he was, chose for 
his allegory a broad and vital theme. In Paradise Lost, 
Milton was concerned with some of the deepest mysteries 
of theology. When we pass beyond all the splendid poetry, 
the magnificent imagery in which he has clothed his pur- 
pose, we see that Milton's primary object is to reconcile 
the existence of sin in the world with the wisdom, goodness, 
and omnipotence of God, and that his ultimate appeal is to 
the intellect. In Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan is not occu- 
pied with such abstract and philosophical speculations; his 
purpose is purely practical, and his appeal is not to the 
head but to the heart. Milton's aim, to "justify the ways 
of God to men, " is general: the key-note of Bunyan's book 
is the cry of the individual conscience; it is heard in the 
question of Christian at the very beginning of the allegory, 
"What shall/ do to be saved?" Bunyan's appeal is thus 
direct and personal, for Christian, the pilgrim, is a repre- 
1 "Life of Bunyan" in Encyclopedia Britannica. 



BUNYAN. 301 

sentative man, corresponding, in many ways, to the hero 
of the old Moralities ; he is a type of the race. Christian's 
journey, it is true, is not every man's journey through this 
world; it is the story of a pilgrimage "from the City of 
Destruction to the City of Zion;"but the general treat- 
ment of this theme is so broadly human, that Christian's 
pilgrimage becomes the living and dramatic record of 
man's spiritual progress, the type of the battle fought by 
every thinking man whose hopes and aspirations are not 
wholly earthly and material. This largeness of view is 
one of the most surprising features of Bunyan's book, and 
one of the reasons for its perennial interest. Froude's 
views on theological questions were widely different from 
those of Bunyan, yet Froude wrote: "The religion of Pil- 
grim's Progress is the religion which must be always and 
everywhere, as long as man believes that he has a soul and 
is responsible for his actions." * 

And this theme of fundamental and almost universal in- 
terest is not presented in an abstract, or doctrinal, form, 
it is made extraordinarily real by the intensity of Bunyan's 
earnestness, extraordinarily picturesque and dramatic by 
the vividness of his poetic imagination. Christian's ex- 
periences are real to us because they were real to Bunyan; 
because Bunyan himself had sunk in the Slough of De- 
spond, climbed the Hill of Difficulty, and fought his own 
fight with Apollyon. He had lived in the presence of the 
invisible; he still bore the scars of his own awful conflict, 
and the powers of evil had for him a positive and objective 
reality. He could describe these things from bitter ex- 
perience ; he could describe them poetically because he had 
that power of imagery which distinguishes the poet. He 
turns instinctively to imagery when he describes his tor- 
ments in Grace Abounding. Describing one of his periods 
of doubt and depression, he wrote: "I found myself in 

1 Life of Bunyan. 



302 DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

a miry bog, that shook if I did but stir." In another place 
he speaks of his "tumultuous thoughts, that did use, like 
masterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow, and make an 
hideous noise within me." It is this inborn power to con- 
ceive of the invisible and the intangible, in objective forms, 
that makes the allegory in the Pilgrim' } s Progress so spon- 
taneous, so free from any suggestion of artifice. Bunyan, 
moreover, was not a mere sublime visionary, oblivious of 
the vulgar realities around him; he was a shrewd observer 
of human life and character, and his intensely spiritual 
nature was well ballasted with humour and solid common 
sense. Although Pilgrim's Progress purports to be a dream, 
Bunyan does not transport us to cloud-land. Christian 
travels through our familiar and every-day world, meeting 
many very substantial human beings in the course of his 
journey o The very names of Bunyan's characters are 
often miracles of characterisation. Mr. By-Ends alone, 
whose judgment always happened to coincide with his 
worldly advantage, shows Bunyan's satiric humour, his 
insight into human nature, and his power of dramatic 
portraiture. In this hold on real life, Pilgrim's Progress 
resembles Langland's Piers the Plowman, and differs very 
widely from the Faerie Queene. 

To such enduring qualities in Pilgrim's Progress, we must 
add the remarkable strength, simplicity, and beauty of its 
style. Like many another Puritan, Bunyan had 
?tyiJ an S rea d an d re-read the Bible, until the strong, vig- 
orous, and musical English of King James' Trans- 
lation had become a part of his mental as well as his spiritual 
life. His style was formed, his images were often taken from 
this great model, and his prose has much of the grandeur 
and restraint of his original. This reticence is characteristic 
of Bunyan's style; he says what he means with directness 
and precision, and produces the impression he desires with- 
out the introduction of one superfluous word. In one place 



BUNYAN. 303 

the inhabitants of heaven are briefly described as " the shin- 
ing ones," but the phrase seems to light up the page. This 
is Bunyan's description of the entrance of Christian and 
Hopeful into the heavenly city : " Now I saw in my dream, 
that these two men went in at the gate; and lo! as they 
entered, they were transfigured; and they had raiment put 
on that shone like gold. There were also that met them 
with harps and crowns, and gave them to them; the harps 
to praise withal, and the crowns in token of honour. Then 
I heard in my dream, that all the bells in the city rang 
again for joy, and that it was said unto them, l Enter ye 
into the joy of your Lord.'" 

Such, then, are some of the great qualities which have 
made a book, written without conscious art and with no 
thought of literary fame, a great classic. When Bunyan 
wrote, the fine gentlemen of the Restoration, the pro- 
fessional authors, and critics, were bent on reforming the 
language, and busy declaring the true principles of the 
literary art. The tinker in Bedford gaol knew nothing 
of these matters. He had something to say, he was con- 
strained to give his message as best he could, but to him 
the message was the important matter, not the words in 
which it was delivered. "I could also," he says in Grace 
Abounding, "have slipped into a style much higher than 
this in which I have here discoursed, and could have 
adorned all things more than I have seemed to do; but I 
dare not. God did not play in convincing of me; the 
Devil did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play 
when I sunk as into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of 
Hell caught hold upon me : wherefore I may not play in 
relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down 
the thing as it was." Here in brief is the main source of 
Bunyan's power. 

There are few more dramatic contrasts than that between 
such a man and John Dryden, the poet laureate of the 



304 DECLINE OF THE KEXAISSAKCE. 

England of the Restoration. Diyden had great abilities, 
scholarly training, social position, and a share of the royal 
favour. He won immense reputation in his own age, and 
he holds an assured place among the great writers of Eng- 
land, but he wrote nothing that so moved and moulded the 
world as Pilgrim's Progress. He had no particular mes- 
sage unless it was that in literature the words are more 
important than the thought. His judgment, like that of 
Mr. By-Ends, often agreed with his worldly advantage. 
The difference between Dryden and Bunyan is fundamen- 
tal. It is the difference between the practical man of 
letters, the finished craftsman who knows his public and 
aims to give it what it wants, and the man of genius, who, 
strong in a vital conviction, tells the world simply and 
strongly the thing he believes. But when Milton com- 
posed Paradise Lost, in blindness and solitude, when 
Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress in prison, the age of 
Puritanism was passing, the age of Dryden and the men 
of the Restoration had already come. 



PART III. 

THE FRENCH INFLUENCE. 
(1660-Cm. 1750.) 

CHAPTER I. 

THE ENGLAND OF THE RESTORATION. 

(1660-1700.) 

"We conquer'd France, but felt our captive's charms; 
Her arts victorious triumphed o'er our arms ; 
Britain, to soft refinements less a foe, 
Wit grew polite, and numbers learn'd to flow. 
Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join 
The varying verse, the full-resounding line, 
The long majestic march, and energy divine. " 

— Pope, 

The Restoration of the Monarchy under Charles II. is 
one of the great turning-points in the history of England. 
The results ^ ^ s more than a change in government: it 
of the ^ marks the beginning of a new England in life, 
es ora ion. « n thought, and in literature. How is this 
seemingly sudden change to be explained? The King's 
return promoted but did not cause it: it was rather this 
change in the feelings of the nation that led it to bring 
back the King. The Puritan had attempted a splendid, 
but impossible, task — and had failed. The pure passion 
for liberty had ended in a military despotism. The zeal 
for religion had fallen, in too many cases, into cant and 
hypocrisy. The fire of enthusiasm which had burned in 

305 



306 RESTORATION ENGLAND. 

Hampden, Cromwell, and Milton had grown cold; men had 
become suspicious of high aims, they wanted ease. The 
Puritan had set up a fixed pattern of righteousness, 
lofty indeed, but formal, uncompromising, and severe, 
and had thought to compel men to come up to his stand- 
ard. He had made "Merrie England ;; a dismal England; 
he had forbidden dancing, and made Christmas a fast- 
day; he had dreamed that because he was virtuous there 
should "be no more cakes and ale." Then came the 
day of reckoning. There was something of the healthy 
savage still in the race. They had been pent in, and 
hectored, and drilled through a long session, but now 
school was out, and the reign of the schoolmasters was 
over. What wonder, then, that joyful crowds greeted the 
King when he landed at Dover; that his journey to Lon- 
don was a triumphal progress through shouting multi- 
tudes; that the bells were set ringing, and the flags 
flying, — the King had come to enjoy his own again, 
and his people were in the right mood to enjo} 7 it with 
him. 

Over-strictness naturally leads to over-indulgence, and 
for the time the violence of the reaction transformed the 
The protest na tion. The May-poles were set up again; the 
against the Puritan Sabbath was disregarded ; the brutal 
sport of bear-baiting revived. The sombre 
dress, solemn face, and scriptural phrase of the Puritan 
had become detestable and ridiculous in men's eyes; and 
many a gay Cavalier, despising this as mere hypocrisy, 
took pains to show by the openness of his vices, that he 
at least was no hypocrite. While Milton, unmoved in 
adversity, was composing Paradise Lost, the ideals of 
Puritanism were travestied in the clever but vulgar verse 
of Samuel Butler. Butler had been clerk to a Puritan 
gentleman, and Hudibras (Part i. 1663) is a coarse 
burlesque of the Puritan and his cause. It is rough, 



PROTEST AGAINST PURITANISM. 30T 

lively doggerel, keen and quotable, and it delighted the 
people and the King. The Church did little to check the 
wickedness of the time, and the Court did much to in- 
crease it. The King, witty, good-humoured, and gifted 
with an easy charm of manner, was a selfish voluptuary, 
without shame, patriotism, or honour, and his Court became 
a centre of evil influences which corrupted society and 
defiled literature. Gay, dissolute courtiers, like Lord 
Rochester and Sir Charles Sedley, wrote lyrics which, 
although not without lightness and lyrical charm, often 
show only too clearly the moral depravity of the time. 
The King was a patron of the drama; and the theatres, 
which had been practically shut for nearly eighteen years, 
were soon crowded with fashionable audiences, demand- 
ing to be amused. The day of the romantic comedy, of 
Twelfth Night and As You Like It, had passed; and a new 
kind of comedy took form, light, witty, cynical, immoral, 
- — suited to the taste of the time. In tragedy, too, in 
deference, it is said, to the taste of the King, dramatists 
turned from the Elizabethan masters, and sought their 
models in France. Like the French tragedies, these 
heroic plays, as they were called, were in rhyme, the 
heroic couplet being substituted for the traditional blank 
verse of the English stage. In these tragedies, the poetry, 
passion, and intense humanity of the Elizabethan drama, 
were too often replaced by mere rant and pompous 
declamation, as though the writer sought to hide his lack 
of feeling under his high-sounding lines. 

But we must be careful to note that this reaction was 
not so sweeping as it seems. There were those who were 
The survivors not swe P^' away with the current, nor was the 
of the older work of Puritanism altogether undone. It was 
literature. & ^ er ^ Restoration that Milton, standing 
apart from the riot of London, produced his greatest poems; 
that Izaak Walton wrote his life of George Herbert (1670^ 



308 RESTORATION ENGLAND. 

and John Bunyan his Pilgrim's Progress (1678-1684) and 
Holy War (1682); that we hear in James Shirley and 
Thomas Otway, some echoes, however faint, of the drama 
of Elizabeth. 

Such men, however, belonged to an older generation, 
and represented a kind of writing which was rapidly pass- 

ing out of favour. To understand the course of 
influence. literary history after the Restoration, we must 

rather study the men who introduced or popu- 
larised a new style of writing, and left behind them works 
which became the' models of a succeeding generation. 

What, then, was the spirit of this age, and what did its 
great writers accomplish for literature? To understand 
the state of England after the Restoration, we must realise 
that it was not merely a time of reaction from Puritanic 
restraints, but a time when the higher energies of the 
nation were temporarily exhausted. Ever since the influ- 
ence of the Renaissance first stirred the depths of the 
English nature, and enabled it for the first time to express 
its full force in literature, ever since then the nation had 
been living under the strain of strong excitement and 
heroic endeavour. There had been something large and 
heroic in the Elizabethan Age ; the nation had poured out 
its strength in great achievements ; in literature, it had 
shown a lavish creative energy; and, following hard upon 
the age of Shakespeare and the Armada, there had come 
years no less intense and exacting, of religious ardour and 
civil conflict, of warring principles and of high ideals. 
\ The Restoration found England emotionally exhausted; 
• men had grown suspicious of great emotions; they doubted 
the wisdom of sacrificing comfort to lofty aims; their tem- 
per was cold, worldly, and prosaic, and they forsook enthu- 
siasm for reason and "good sense." Right or wrong, 
Charles I. gave his life for a principle. Charles II., believ- 
ing in the same principle, did not think it worth the sac- 



FRENCH INFLUENCE. 309 

rifice of his comforts, and preferred to make any base con- 
cession rather than to " start out on his travels again." 

Now this hard, prosaic temper is apparent in the altered 
style of writing, and in the prevailing theories of literary 
Signs of the art - Even before the Restoration we find in 
time in lit- some writers a tendency to abandon the fan- 
erary sty e. ^ as ^i c anc [ extravagant comparisons or " con- 
ceits" for a clearer but less exalted style. And now at 
the Restoration, when a great creative and imaginative 
period had come to an end, men turned instinctively to 
literary criticism; inspiration was failing, and they natur- 
ally began to insist upon a greater attention to the rules of 
art. "Nothing," said Dryden, the representative writer 
of the age, " nothing is truly sublime that is not just and 
proper." Many felt that the English poets of the past, 
however great their genius, had fallen short because they 
neglected, through ignorance or indifference, the estab- 
lished rules of composition; and Thomas Rhymer (1641- 
1713), a noted critic of the day, ridiculed Shakespeare's 
tragedies and sneered at Paradise Lost. There was a feel- 
ing that the literature of Shakespeare and of Milton needed 
to be reformed, and that the remedy for the lawlessness 
of the past lay in an application of classic rules, and the 
greatest attention to the form of expression. It was in 
accordance with this spirit that Horace's Art of Poetry, a 
classic manual of precepts for the poet's guidance, was 
translated by the Earl of Roscommon (1680). It is in com- 
mending this translation, that Edmund Waller (1605- 
1687), a poet who was looked up to as the great refiner of 
language and versification, thus expresses the character- 
istic opinion of the time* 



Horace will our superfluous branches prune 
Give us new rules, and set our harp in tune; 
Direct us how to back the Winged Horse, 
Favour his flight, and moderate his force. 



310 RESTORATION ENGLAND. 

Tho ' Poets may of inspiration boast, 

Their rage, ill-governed, in the clouds is lost. " l 

The results of all this may be briefly stated. The aim 
of this new school of writers was to be clear, precise, well- 
Effects of the balanced, and moderate, and in this they may 
new style on be said to have succeeded. They gave to 
English prose a style, which by its strength, 
simplicity, and directness, was admirably adapted for all 
ordinary every-day needs. And similarly by their handling 
of the heroic couplet they gave to English poetry a form of 
expression which was lucid, concise, and epigrammatic; 
a medium skilfully adapted to description, argument, or 
moral teaching, and a marvellous instrument for satire. 
So far this new manner was a distinct gain to literature; 
but it was a gain that brought a great loss with it, for this 
new style became so supreme that, for a time, it almost 
altogether replaced the old. The serious limitations of 
Dryden and his followers, their deficient sense of beauty, 
their lack of spiritual vision, are reflected in their style, 
excellent for certain useful purposes, but totally inadequate 
for higher needs. When men exchanged the noble elo- 
quence of Jeremy Taylor for the sensible pedestrian gait 
of Dryden, when they replaced the rich and complex har- 
monies of Milton with the thinner melody and measured 
stroke of the rhymed couplet, they were like men who 
should cease to cultivate the rose, because the potato is a 
useful article. 

This critical study of writing as an art, this care in 
regard to style, was partly due to the example and the 
French influ- i n fl uenc e of France. In the early years of the 
ence on Eng- Renaissance, Italy had been the guide and in- 
s sty e * spirer of Europe in scholarship and art. But 
by the seventeenth century she was no longer the centre of 
culture; her influence on literature had sensibly declined 

1 Upon the Earl of Roscommon's Translation of Horace, De Arte Poetica. 



FRENCH INFLUENCE. 311 

throughout the whole .of Europe, and, at this time, was 
being partially replaced by that of France. Early in the 
seventeenth century the French poet Malherbe (1555- 
1628) had begun a so-called reform of poetic language and 
style, similar to that which took place in England under 
Dryden and his successors. Malherbe, who was called "the 
tyrant of words and syllables," strove to banish the warmer, 
more highly coloured style, for one more fixed and re- 
strained. In this he was followed by Boileau (1636-1711), 
a poet who became the literary law-giver of the day. In 
his Art of Poetry (1673), Boileau urged poets to leave glit- 
tering rhapsodies to the Italians, and endeavour always to 
write with "good sense." When these doctrines were put 
forth, France stood high in the eyes of Europe, and Louis 
XIV. (1643-1715), the most splendid living embodiment of 
despotic kingship, had gathered a brilliant group of writers 
at his court. It was the "Classical Age" of French litera- 
ture, a time when men felt bound to follow the rules and 
practices of the past, but a time splendid nevertheless with 
great names in poetry and in prose. For the time, French 
literature dominated Europe, and it was but natural that 
England, in common with other nations, should have re- 
sponded to her influence. But there was also an especial 
reason why English literature should have come under the 
influence of the French. Charles II. had spent a great part 
of his exile in France, and while there he had gained some 
acquaintance with French literature, and acquired a liking 
for the French style. "He was in France," says a writer 
of the time, "at a time when they were most set on re- 
forming their language," and so, he adds, he approved 
certain preachers whose style was " clear, short, and plain." 
It is thus plain that all these forces, the changed temper 
of the nation, the influence of France, and the personal 
taste and influence of the king, were pushing English liter- 
ature in the same direction. 



312 RESTORATION ENGLAND. 

JOHN DRYDEN. 
(1631-1700.) 

The changes in literature after the Restoration, in both 
its spirit and its style, were' seen most perfectly in the work 
of John Dryden, a man of cold, logical intellect, and, in his 
own province, one of the great masters of our English 
tongue. Few men have so perfectly represented their age 
or so manifestly determined the course of literary history. 
From the Restoration to the end of the century, Dryden 
dominated English letters, "the greatest man of a little 
age;" and long after his death the student of literature 
sees in both prose and poetry the impress of his powerful 
personality and literary skill. 

John Dryden was born at Aldwinkle, a small village in 
the northeastern part of Northamptonshire, in 1631. He 
came of a highly respectable Puritan family, 
some of his relations both on his father's and his 
mother's side being active supporters of the Parliamentary 
cause. But little is known of his early years. He went 
to Westminster School, London, and in 1650 he entered 
Trinity College, Cambridge. After leaving the University 
in 1657, he is supposed to have attached himself to the 
Puritan household of his cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, a 
favoured follower of Cromwell. Before he left Westminster, 
Dryden had contributed some verses to a book of elegies, 
published in memory of one of his schoolfellows, Lord 
Hastings. Unmeasured in their flattery, these verses are 
cold, artificial, and insincere. It is evident that the young 
poet has regarded the event as an opportunity to display 
his rhetorical dexterity, and the perverted ingenuity and 
false taste of his "conceits" outdo the worst extravagances 
of Donne and his followers. The poem is a boyish effort, 
but it shows some traits in the character of the man, an 



DRYDEN. 313 

ability to comply with a prevailing literary fashion, a 

tendency to substitute rhetoric for genuine feeling, and a 

mastery of the art of adulation. 

Dryden was naturally among the poets who lamented 

the death of the Protector, and his Heroic Stanzas on the 

„ , Death of Cromwell (1659) show a gain in mod- 

Early poems. ' . \ ' to . 

eration and sincerity, lhe poem is skilfully 

constructed, and impresses us with a sense of Cromwell's 

greatness. At times we recognise, as in the strong line, — 

" Fame of the asserted sea through Europe blown," — 

a fulness of utterance which suggests the future master of 
the "majestic line." This tribute to the great Puritan was 
followed, a year later, by the Astroea Redux, an effusive 
welcome to Charles II. upon his "happy restoration and 
return." "Church and State," the poet declares, have 
groaned for the king's absence ; age has been in despair — 

" To see the rebel thrive, the loyal cross'd," 

but now the Golden Age returns. The "blessed saints" 
lean from their stars in "joyful wonder" to see General 
Monk restore the exiled king, and the chalk-cliffs of Albion, 
clad in the white of penitence, advance to welcome the 
returning monarch. All this sounds strange from the late 
eulogist of Cromwell, yet it must be remembered that many 
Puritans honestly believed at this time that the hope of 
the nation lay in the king's return. Dryden may have 
been honest in his sudden conversion; nevertheless, his 
poem, with its elaborate rhetoric and its strain of absurd 
flattery, carries with it no conviction of sincerity. The 
Astroea Redux is otherwise noteworthy as affording the first 
example of Dryden's use of the heroic couplet, the verse- 
form which became so effective in his hands, and which he, 
with Pope his great successor, made the standard metre of 
English poetry for a hundred years. 



314 RESTORATION ENGLAND. 

If we are ignorant of the motives which led Dryclen to 
change his political faith, the reasons which led to his next 
step are only too clear. In spite of his ancestry, 
* he was entirely lacking in that uncompromising 
independence which was so conspicuous a trait of the Puri- 
tan character. Milton felt that the true poet was God's 
prophet, bound to speak the truth delivered to him: but 
Dryden made writing a trade; he was quick to feel what 
the public wanted, and he showed no scruples in adapting 
his wares to the popular demand. After the Restoration, 
play-writing was the most lucrative branch of literature; 
and for about eighteen years (1663-1681) Dryden gave up 
nearly all of his time and energy to writing plays, although 
he felt that in so doing he was sacrificing his higher success 
to a transient popularity. He writes frankly: "I confess 
my chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. 
If the humour of this be for low comedy, small accidents 
and raillery, / will force my genius to obey it, though with 
more reputation I could write in verse." 1 

Dryden carried his complaisance so far that, in his efforts 
"to delight" his age, he produced some comedies whose 
license was remarked even in that lax time. It is charac- 
teristic of him, that the coarseness which disfigures so 
many of his plays, was rather a bid for popular favour than 
an expression of his own inclination : in Dr. Johnson's words, 
it was "his trade rather than his pleasure." 2 Personally 
he seems to have preferred virtue, yet he did not scruple 
for his own profit to encourage the moral corruption which 
surrounded him. While he traded in vice, he kept a touch 
of the Puritan's conscience. In one of the most beauti- 
tiful of his poems, he cries out in a rare burst of genuine 
feeling: 

1 Preface to The Indian Emperor (1665). 
* Lives of the Poets, "Dryden." 



DRYDEN. 315 

"O gracious God! how far have we 
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy! 
Made prostitute and profligate the Muse, 
Debased to each obscene and impious use, 
Whose harmony was first ordained above 
For tongues of angels and for hymns of love. " l 

And towards the close of his life, he meets the fierce attack 
of Jeremy Collier, who wrote a famous book upon the 
Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage (1698), with a 
manly acknowledgment of his fault. This episode has 
been dwelt on here, because perhaps more than any other, 
it shows us the man, John Dry den, as he was. Amiable, 
kindly, and not without good impulses, we see in this weak 
compliance with the public taste the spirit of the time- 
server, of a man willing to sacrifice principle to a worldly 
expediency. He was one of those who are resolved to 
"delight" their age at any cost, and the judgment on such 
men is summed up in the saying that — 

" Those who live to please must please to live."' 

One poem, the Annus Mirabilis (1667), broke this long 
period of dramatic activity. It deals with two great 

events of the wonderful year 1666, the war with 
Mirabilis. Holland, and the great fire of London. 

From the worldly point of view, Dryden did 
not serve the stage for naught. His plays are now never 

acted, and but seldom read; but he won a fore- 
Success. most place among the dramatists of his day. 

In 1670 he was made Poet-Laureate, with a 
salary of £200 a year, and in 1677 he made an advanta- 
geous contract to furnish plays to the King's theatre. 

1 Ode to Mistress Anne Killigrew. 

2 Dr. Johnson's Prologue at the Opening of the Theatre Royal, 1747. 
The student would do well to consult this poem for its strictures on 
the Restoration drama, and its attack upon the playwright who strove 
to please the depraved taste of the age. 



316 RESTORATION ENGLAND. 

At fifty, Dryden had made but a slight impression as a 
poet: his reputation rested almost entirely on his plays. 
Yet at fifty, he entered suddenly upon the most 
splendid period of his career. All England had 
watched the struggle between the Earl of Shaftesbury, a 
brilliant but dangerous politician, and the Crown. Shaftes- 
bury had schemed to secure the succession to the Duke of 
Monmouth, and in 1681 the climax was reached in the 
arrest of the Earl and in his indictment for High Treason. 
Dryden seized the dramatic moment, and spoke to the 
nation while it hung breathless on the issue, in his satirical 
allegory, Absalom and Achitophel (1681). The revolt of 
Absalom, aided by his evil counsellor Achitophel, against 
his father, David, becomes in Dryden's satire, an allegory 
of the ambitious desires of Monmouth and Shaftesbury 
against the King. After years of apprenticeship, Dryden 
had come to his own, and we feel at last those distinctive 
qualities in which he has been seldom approached and 
never excelled — the impetus of the rapid verse, the keen, 
discriminating intellect, the epigrammatic brilliancy, and 
the tireless vigour that animates the whole. The story is 
but a slight background for a pitiless delineation of char- 
acter. The men whose names were in every mouth, Shaftes- 
bury, Buckingham, and the rest, are pilloried in passages 
which are marvels of characterisation, for all England to 
see. Other satiric masterpieces followed, among which 
Mac-Flecknoe (1682) is perhaps the best known. In it, 
Dryden ridicules Thomas Shadwell, then leading poet and 
dramatist of the opposite political party. Shadwell is 
derisively styled Mac Flecknoe (or the " son of Flecknoe ")> 
that is, the poetical successor as ruler of the realm of 
Nonsense, of a certain Richard Flecknoe, an obscure and 
unfortunate poet who had lately died. 

Dryden did not entirely abandon the drama after his 
success in satire, but his energies were chiefly spent in 



DRYDEN. 317 

other directions. He showed his extraordinary power of 

Other works. arguing in VerSe > in the Reli 9 io Laici ( 1682 )> 

' and the Hind and the Panther (1687). The first 
is a declaration of faith in the doctrines of the Church of 
England, the second an elaborate argument in behalf of the 
doctrines of the Church of Rome, Dryden having changed 
his religion after the accession of the Roman Catholic, 
James II. The "milk-white Hind" represents the Church 
of Rome, the Panther the Church of England, and the two 
oddly assorted beasts engage in a lengthy theological 
argument. But, in spite of the manifest absurdity of its 
scheme, the poem has great melody, charm, and intellectual 
power, and shows us Dryden at his best. 

The accession of William and Mary and the triumph of 
Protestantism was a heavy blow to Dryden's fortunes. He 
did not again change his religion, and in con- 
sequence lost his pension and the laureateship, 
his old enemy Shadwell being appointed in his place. This 
single act of constancy stands out in the midst of all the 
fluctuations of Dryden's career, and at no time of his life 
is he so worthy of our respect as in the years that followed. 
He toiled manfully for his support; he wrote plays, trans- 
lated Vergil and other classic poets, modernised Chaucer, 
and told some stories from Boccaccio in charming verse. He 
toiled, — as he tells us a few years before his death, — 
"struggling with want, oppressed with sickness," and 
"curbed" in his genius, yet steady to "his principles" and 
not "dispirited with" his afflictions. 1 

Tradition pictures him as sitting in the sunny bow win- 
dow of Will's Coffee House, a red-faced, portly, grey-haired 
old man, the literary law-giver of the young wits and ris- 
ing authors, who loved to gather about him and listen to 
his stories of the past. He died in 1700, and was buried 
at the feet of Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. 

1 "Postscript to the Reader," in his Dedication of the JZneis, 1697. 



318 RESTORATION ENGLAND. 

In his strength and in his weakness Dryden is the repre- 
sentative of his time. He lived in an age when the critical 
faculties were stronger than the creative, and he is 
and wk. the father of modern literary criticism, the mas- 
ter of clear thought and forcible expression. He 
was not the inspired poet, but the conscientious literary work- 
man, toiling for years to gain the mastery of his craft. His 
work is unequal, experimental; he acquires his art slowly. 
His first poem is disfigured by the very faults that he is 
afterwards to expel from literature ; his heroic plays are full 
of the rant and exaggeration which he was afterwards to 
condemn. He succeeded by the sheer force of a vigorous 
intellect, and by an instinctive response to the spirit and 
needs of his time. He simplifies and strengthens his style, 
until he is able to produce models for his successors. His 
poetry has obvious merits, and as obvious defects. He is 
the greatest satirist in the range of English poetry; his 
verse has clearness, ease, and a vigour which at times is 
almost brutal, -.he can be smooth and swift, majestic and 
sonorous. But in reading Dryden we feel the spiritual 
limitations of his time; everything seems material and 
earthly, with no redeeming touch of the divine. He shows 
little love of nature, little sense of beauty, little real reli- 
gion; tenderness, pathos, compassion, and a sense of the 
"mystery of things" are almost entirely absent from his 
works. In reading him we often feel the great gulf that 
divides rhetoric from poetry, and the splendid resonance 
of some of his odes seems but sounding brass beside the 
finer music of Collins, Keats, or Shelley. But we must re- 
member that there are many kinds of poetry, and that in 
his own province Dryden is supreme. 

In prose Dryden's work was almost equally important. 
He introduced a plainer style of writing, better adapted to 
the daily needs of our modern world than the more eloquent, 
poetical, and involved manner of some of his predecessors. 



RESTORATION DRAMA. 319 

In this he performed a distinct service; for, while we may 
prefer the loftier and fuller style, the practical usefulness of 
a more direct and simple mode of expression is self-evident. 

Dry den's prose is important for other things besides style. 
He is one of the masters in English criticism ; and the criti- 
cal prefaces to his plays and poems, as well as his famous 
Essay of Dramatic Poesy, are among the most interesting 
and valuable of his works. 

Something of Dryden's character has been already shown 
in the brief story of his life. We have seen him catering to 
the weaknesses and vices of his time; changeable in his 
opinions; fulsome in his flattery of the great and powerful. 
He studied the nation's moods, and was skilful in appeal- 
ing to the popular interest by treating of the topic of the 
hour. How far he was sincere we cannot tell; it is not 
unlikely that he lacked depth of conviction, and so easily 
persuaded himself that the truth lay on the winning side. 
Thinking of him we realise that, to attain the highest suc- 
cess in literature or in life, something more is needed than 
all the powers of the intellect, or all the skill of a practised 
writer, — something worthy of the name of greatness, — 
loftiness of character and nobility of life. 

Other Restoration Writers. 

The Drama. 

Among the chief writers of tragedy at this time besides 
Dryden, were Thomas Otway (1651-85) and Nathaniel 
Lee (c. 1653-1691). In Otway's best verse 
tragedy? 1011 something of the glory and passion of the Eliza- 
bethan tragedy yet lingers. His life was that of 
the adventurer, varied, dissipated, and unhappy. The son 
of a country clergyman, he left Oxford in 1C72 and tried 
his fortune on the London stage. For a time he was a 
soldier; but, forced to abandon the army, he returned to 



320 RESTORATION ENGLAND. 

London to write for the stage. His greatest plays are The 
Orphans (1680), and Venice Preserved (1682), which has 
been called "the best tragedy of the Restoration." 1 He 
lived in poverty and died miserably at thirty-four. The 
following description of morning in the country, which 
shows a true feeling for Nature unusual in the poetry 
of that time, will give some idea of Otway's best style. 

Morning. 

"Wished morning's come; and now upon the plains 
And distant mountains, where they feed their flocks, 
The happy shepherds leave their homely huts, 
And with their pipes proclaim the new-born day. 
The lusty swain comes with his well-filled scrip 
Of healthful viands, which, when hunger calls, 
With much content and appetite he eats, 
To follow in the fields his daily toil, 
And dress the grateful glebe that yields him fruits. 
The beasts that under the warm hedges slept, 
And weathered out the cold, bleak night, are up, 
And, looking towards the neighbouring pastures, raise 
The voice, and bid their fellow-brutes good-morrow. 
The cheerful birds, too, on the tops of trees, 
Assemble* all in choirs, and with their notes 
Salute and welcome up the rising sun. " 

There is a melancholy resemblance between the career of 
Nathaniel, or "Nat" Lee, and that of his contemporary 
Otway. Like Otway, a clergyman's son, he also 
sought his fortune in London, and, after failing 
as an actor, became a playwright. His life was vicious, 
drunken, and darkened by insanity, and he died miserably 
at thirty-seven. Lee has been called "a vulgar Marlowe." 
His plays have touches of true poetry and genuine pathos, 
but they are often marred by a declamatory frenzy and 
extravagance. At his best he has an almost Elizabethan 
fervor; at his worst his violence and his rhetoric carry 
him beyond that fatal line that separates the sublime 
from the ridiculous. 

1 A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, by Edmund Gosse. 



RESTORATION DRAMA. 321 

The general character of the Restoration comedy has 
been already indicated (p. 307). It is distinctly English, 

although the plots were often drawn from Span- 
comedy! 10n ^ n or French sources ; its merits are its wit and 

its living pictures of the fashionable town-life of 
the day; its greatest blot is its airy contempt for all moral 
laws. Among the most famous comic writers of the Resto- 
ration were William Wycherley (1640-1715), a "fine 
gentleman" and a favourite of Charles II.; William 
Congreve (1670-1729), courted, flattered, and famous; Sir 
John Vanbrugh (1666-1726), and George Farquhar 
(1678-1708). Among these Congreve holds the first place, 
the acknowledged master in English of "the comedy of 
repartee," the comedy, that is, conspicuous for the witty 
thrust and parry of its dialogue, rather than for its delin- 
eation of humours after the manner of Jonson. Besides 
Love for Love (1694), The Way of the World (1700), and 
other sparkling comedies, Congreve wrote The Mourning 
Bride (1697), a tragedy of no little poetic beauty. 

Other Writers. 

In the philosophy of John Locke (1632-1714) with its 
strong grasp of facts, its plain common sense, its conviction 
that reason is the best and surest guide to truth, we see 
another side of the reaction against the Puritan spirit. 
This sense of the value of facts, ascertained by observa- 
tion and experiment, and interpreted by reason, is further 
shown in the great development of science. 

The interest in scientific inquiry extends even to the gay 
and versatile Duke of Buckingham, who dabbled in chemis- 
try, and to the flippant King. The foundation of The Royal 
Society in 1662, for the promotion of scientific research, is 
one of the signs of the time ; nor must we forget that this 
age of Dryden and Pope is also the age of one of England's 
greatest scientists, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). 



CHAPTER n. 

THE AGE OF POPE. 

(Cm. 1700-1750.) 

"In tea-cup times of hood and hoop, 
Or while the patch was worn. " 

— Tennyson: The Talking Oak. 

While the death of Dryden removed a great personality 
from the literary and social life of London, much of the 
Dryden' s sue- s P^ r ^ anc * manner of Dryden and his contem- 
cessors con- poraries lived on in the work of their successors. 
work *** ^ n ^ r " J° nnson,s phrase, Dryden had " enriched 
his language" with a great "variety of models," 
and after these "models" much of the best work done by 
the succeeding generation was formed. Dryden, Cowley, and 
Waller were thought to have begun a new and better era 
in literature, an era of smoother versification, and greater 
propriety and correctness of expression. The writers im- 
mediately succeeding Dryden, therefore set themselves to 
carry forward the literary movement thus begun, to apply 
the principles laid down, to copy and if possible to improve 
upon the "models " bequeathed to them. The immediate 
reasons for this were the strong personal influence of Dry- 
den, and the brilliancy of his work; but another and deeper 
cause is found in the fact that there had been no great 
change in the capital or in the nation since Dryden's time. 
In the age of Pope, Dryden's great successor, London life 
was much the same as in the age of Dryden, and so it came 
about that literature, the voice of that life, was much the 
same also. The influence of the French writers increased. 



POPE. 323 

Pope speaks of Boileau as " the first poet of the French, as 
Virgil of the Latin/' 1 and declares that he sits on the throne 
of Horace as a law-giver to poets. 2 The tendency to fol- 
low the French in attaching the highest importance to a 
perfection of literary form, increased likewise, and lucidity, 
elegance, and propriety of expression became the poets' 
ideal. Thus Addison, the most charming prose-writer of 
the period, declares in the spirit of Boileau "that wit and 
fine writing doth not consist so much in advancing things 
that are new, as in giving things that are known an agree- 
able turn." While Pope himself declares that: 

"True wit is nature to advantage dressed, 
What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed. " 

In accordance with this tendency, Pope gives the heroic 
verse of Dryden a greater smoothness and a finer finish, 
Pope and although in his hands it loses something of its 
the heroic exuberant strength and fire. In his boyhood, 
couplet. Pope was urged to make correctness " his study 
and aim," and he took the advice to heart. 1 His own lines, 
written long after, embody the spirit of his early counsellor 
and express the prevailing critical doctrine of his time. 

"Late, very late, correctness grew our care, 
When the tired nation breathed from civil war, 
Exact Racine, and Corneille's noble fire, 
Showed us that France had something to admire. 
Not but the tragic spirit was our own, 
And full in Shakespeare, fair in Otway shone: 
But Otway failed to polish or refine, 
And fluent Shakespeare scarce effaced a line. 
Ev'n copious Dryden wanted, or forgot, 
The last and greatest art, the art to blot." 3 

As the result of all this thought for style, a manner of verse 
was elaborated which reflects with striking exactness the 
merits and the limitations of its careful builders. It is 

1 Spence's Anecdotes. * Essay on Criticism. 

3 Satires: Book ii. First Epistle. 



324 THE AGE OF POPE. 

generally clear, fluent, and flexible, often clever, often epi- 

grammatic; it can express a trite thought, or 

limitations moral precept, in a neat and easily remembered 

of the pre- CO uplet; it can describe a game of cards or a 

vailing style. 

muddy London street after a shower, with vivid- 
ness and accuracy. But we feel that there is something 
about it which is formal, mechanical, artificial; that it does 
not speak for humanity, but for the literary and social Lon- 
don of Queen Anne ; that it moves on the easy level of the 
worldly and the conventional, incapable of comprehending 
the tragic depths of man's anguish, or the heights to which, 
at rare moments, his spirit can ascend. Limited as it was 
in thought and emotion, this verse became a convenient 
medium for the treatment of a great variety of themes. 
As style was thought the essential factor, the most com- 
monplace and prosaic subjects were treated in verse, 
apparently on the theory that they could be made poetical 
by the outward adornments of rhyme and rhythm. One 
poet discusses .the raising of sheep, the treatment of their 
diseases, and the details of the manufacture of woollens; 
another, the Art of Preserving Health; while another sets 
forth the advantages of fresh air and exercise ; and in this 
way the distinction between poetry and prose is too often 
lost. Indeed, it was "an age of prose," and its verse 
is often little or nothing but prose disguised in rhyme. 
Literature in the age of Pope was, in every sense, a 
literature of the town, born in the town, written mainly 

for the town, and often portraying the life of 
of " the tow." the town to the minutest detail. The London 

of Pope is even more wonderfully alive to us 
through literature than the London of Shakespeare. We 
can see its ill-paved streets with their narrow sidewalks 
and their running gutters; we know Grub Street where 
obscure authors fought with debts and starvation; the 
Fleet; the gay boating party on the Thames; the pleasure- 



POPE. 325 

gardens where society drank and flirted, listened to the 
music, and exclaimed at the fireworks. All that restless, 
gay, animated life is still before us; the beauty in her 
sedan chair, the . beau with his lace ruffles and his flowing 
wig; and we can imagine the courtly presentation of the 
snuff-box, or the flutter of the fan. But this brilliant 
surface was but a thin veneer, and beneath it life was 
vulgar, vicious, and cruel. 

The age which prided itself on its polish and politeness 
indulged in bull-baiting and cock-fights; its young aristo- 
crats, wandering in drunken frolics through the ill-lighted 
London streets, habitually committed the most shocking 
outrages on inoff ending passengers. Drunkenness, says 
a high authority, "became for the first time a national 
vice." ! It was confined to no class of society, and there 
is hardly an author of the so-called Augustan Age who was 
entirely free from it. Its underlying brutality and coarse- 
ness of thought and action stain the pages of its literature; 
its misanthropy, its petty spites, and literary rivalries, 
break out in slanderous abuse, and bitter, mirthless satires. 
On every side are indications of a low moral tone. At 
the beginning of the century the Church was lifeless and 
worldly, and its great places were intrigued for and sought 
after as political spoil. Public life was debased, and bribery 
was regarded as a regular feature in the conduct of gov- 
ernment. Many of the greatest men of the time, disgusted 
with the mercenary spirit and low aims which surrounded 
them, lost confidence in human virtue, and expressed — 
sometimes with terrible power — their cynical contempt 
for man, and their hatred of his petty world. Yet even at 
this time the higher and nobler elements of the English 
character were struggling to reassert themselves, and long 
before the death of Pope, the spiritual redemption of 
England had begun. 

1 Lecky, England in the XVIII. Century, I. 516, 



326 THE AGE OF POPE. 

ALEXANDER POPE. 

(1688-1744.) 

"He [Dryden] died, nevertheless, in a good old age, possessed of the 
Kingdom of Wit, and was succeeded by King Alexander, surnamed 
Pope. 

" This prince enjoyed the crown many years, and is thought to have 
stretched the prerogative much farther than his predecessor.' ' 

— Fielding: The Covent Garden Journal, No. 23, 

Pope was beyond all question the most eminent and the 
most representative poet of his time. He directed and 
satisfied the poetic taste of his contemporaries ; he expressed 
the predominant thought and sentiment of the men about 
him ; and he won for himself a central place among the wits, 
philosophers, and statesmen of a brilliant age. " Glorious 
John Dryden/' portly, florid, easy-going, and kindly, is 
gone, and in his place there reigns this new King, "Alex- 
ander, surnamed Pope," a nervous invalid, small, fragile, 
misshapen, his. thin face drawn as if with pain, and yet 
alive with an eager intellect, and lit with the large, brilliant 
eyes of the poet. 

In many ways Pope's story is both painful and pitiable. 
He himself spoke of his life as "a long disease," 1 and he 
spoke truly. A few men, like Robert Louis Stevenson, can 
keep the sound mind in the unsound body; their charac- 
ters untouched by invalidism, their sympathies healthy and 
normal. Pope, unhappily, was not among these few. His 
delicacy of constitution, his nervous sensibility, affect his 
whole life and character; and we cannot help feeling the 
"narrowness, bitterness, and irritability of the invalid in his 
work. Yet there was lodged in his weak and deformed 
body a spirit of indomitable persistence and courage; and, 
in a brutal time that spared neither the weak nor the un- 
fortunate, he won and kept the headship of British letters. 

1 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. 



POPE. 327 

Only those who have worked stubbornly on under the 
weight of pain and weakness, who by sheer force of mind 
and will, and in spite of physical infirmities, have beaten 
the strong man in the race, can imagine the cost of Pope's 
fight for fame, and fairly appreciate his triumph. 

Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. When he 
was about twelve years old his father took a house at Bin- 
p , Hf field, a village near Windsor Forest in Berkshire. 
In this beautiful retreat, then much wilder and 
more thickly wooded than at present, the greater part of 
Pope's early years were spent. The family were Roman 
Catholics, and in the years immediately following the de- 
position of James II. the feeling against persons of that 
faith was very strong. Almost from the first, therefore, 
Pope's religion set him apart, and stood in the way of his 
worldly advancement. Most of the great thinkers and 
writers of England have been regularly educated in accord- 
ance with the established English system ; that is, they have 
gone to Eton, Harrow, Westminster, or one of the other 
great public schools, and thence to the university. Such 
was the training of Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Gray, Byron, 
Shelley, and many others. But Pope, included on account 
of his religion among a "hated minority," grew up entirely 
outside of the regular educational system of his country, 
and separated from the youth of his own age, who would 
have been his natural companions. His education was 
accordingly desultory and superficial. He had some in- 
struction from a priest, and studied for a short time at a 
Roman Catholic seminary near Winchester. Here he is 
said to have begun his career as a satirist by writing a lam- 
poon on the master. The better part of his education he 
gained for himself. A sickly, lonely, and precocious child, 
he found his resource and delight in books, and especially 
in poetry. He read, according to his own account, without 
any design but that of pleasing himself, "like a boy gath- 



323 THE AGE OF POPE. 

ering flowers in the fields just as they fell in his way, 5 ' 1 
Very early he began to write verses himself; he made 
metrical translations of the classics, and composed a tragedy 
and an epic poem of four thousand hues. His reference to 
his precocious facility has become almost proverbial: 

"A? yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, 
I lisped in numbers; for tne numbers came. " 3 

But in fact the " numbers'" seem to have come less spon- 
taneously than this p assage would lead us to suppose. The 
truth is that by hard and careful study and by incessant 
practice Pope was making himself a master of his art. 
When Pope was about sixteen cir. 1704 . he made the ac- 
quaintance of Wycherley. then an elderly man about town. 
following him with all the devotion that a bookish boy with 
literary aspirations naturally feels towards a successful man 
of letters. In a short time he had become known to Steele. 
Addison. Swift, and other great authors of the day. His 
first literary venture was the publication of the Pastorals 
_. _ „ . 1709 , a series of eelocmes, treating: of the 

The Pastorals. • ' e ; o 

four seasons. Pastoral poetry had long since 

become hopelessly artificial, and Pope's pastorals were no 
exception to the rule. According to classic precedent Stre- 
phon and Daphnis contend in song, and Thyrsis mourns 
the death of Daphne. Heathen gods and goddesses are 
domesticated in England, and Apollo is to be gladdened by 
the sacrifice of a "'milk-white bull" near the banks of the 
Thames. But the really notable thing about the Pastorals 
is not their artificiality. — which is only what might have 
been expected, — but the even flow of the verse. This ven- 
ture seems to have been favourably received, and 
Criticism P'-T't's next publication, T : \t Essay on Criticism 
published 1711 . took London by storm. It is 
a didactic poem in which many of the established rules of 

1 S pence's Anecdotes. : Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. 



POPE. 329 

composition are restated in a terse and clever fashion. It 
was, as has been said, an age of criticism, an age when men 
sought to write according to the classic precedents, and 
Pope's poem was in accord with the mood of the time. 
This spirit had already shown itself in a similar manner: 
one writer had composed an Essay on Satire, another an 
Essay on Translated Verse, and it is to poems of this class 
that the Essay on Criticism naturally belongs. Pope's 
work resembles these in subject, but has merit which places 
it far above them. The ideas seem now somewhat trite, 
the argument is not always convincing; yet the poem pos- 
sesses at least one characteristic merit, it is quotable. All 
through it we find couplets in which an idea, often com- 
monplace enough, is packed into a form so terse, striking, 
and remarkable that it has become firmly embedded in our 
ordinary thought and speech. Through his power to trans- 
late a current thought into an almost proverbial form, Pope 
has probably enriched the language with more phrases than 
any other writer save Shakespeare : 

"A little learning is a dangerous thing; 
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." 

"To err is human, to forgive divine." 

"For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." 

Such quotable bits as these are used by thousands who 
are entirely ignorant of their source. 

In 1712 Pope published the first version of The Rape of 

the Lock, a poem so graceful, delicate, cynical, and witty, 

that it seems to embody not only the peculiar 

The Rape of flavour of his genius, but the light tone and shift- 
the Lock. . ° . . ? 

ing colours ot his time. We should probably be 

right in pronouncing The Rape of the Lock the most represen- 
tative poem of its age ; but, in saying this, we must be care- 
ful to remember that after all it depicts and expresses only a 



330 THE AGE OF POPE. 

fragment of the nation's life. Chaucer's Pilgrims repre- 
sented fourteenth-century England, from the knight to the 

plowman. The Rape of : : \-: Loch introduces us to a little 
world of frivolity and fashion, busy with its pleasures, its 
dressing, flirting, and card-playing, in the old London of 
Queen Anne. It is true that the life of the passing hour 
is here made immortal in an: yet that life is not the life of 
the nation, but of a little group of idlers in the town. Yet 
Pope was representative in this very narrowness. In 
those days, fashion, wit, literature, and politics met in 
London. There — men thought — was the hie of Eng- 
land: outside lay a vague regie::, little thought of and sel- 
dom visited: a dull place with stupid squires, and muddy 
roads, where every one was behind the times. Town was 
supreme: and Pope, the poet of the town, represented its 
supremacy. 

The Rape of the Lock literally grew out of that artificial 
society which it depicts and satirises, for it was suggested 
by an actual occurrence in the fashionable world. Lord 
Petre. a young nobleman oi twenty, p : ?sessed himself of a 
lock of hah belonging to a famous beauty of the day. 
Mistress Arabella Permor. The result was a serious mis- 
understanding, and Pope was asked to write a poem that 
should put the whole incident in an absurd light and restore 
cood-humour. Pope acted on the suggestion and produced 
the most perfect mock-heroic poem in the literature of 
England, i: not in the literature of the world. 

The Rape £ is the story of a day in the life of a 

London beauty. We see Belinda luxuriously slumbering 
on till noon, when her lap-clog Shock awakens her. We 
are present, at her toilet, and watch the progress of "the 
sacred rites of pride." We see her with a rty on its 

way up the Thames to Hampton Court, smiling impartially 
upon the ''"well-dressed youths" that crowd about her, the 
very type of liveliness, tact, and coquetry. We follow the 



POPE. 831 

party through the game of ombre, and the coffee, until 
we reach the tragic catastrophe of the severed curl. Where 
can we find so light, so poetical, a treatment of things 
which we think of as trivial or ordinary? Here is the 
epic of the frivolous: true to Pope's world, but true also 
with a little change of dress and scene to the world of the 
pleasure-seeker in Babylon, Rome, or New York. Pope 
suggests to us the vanity and shallowness. of this life; and, 
by celebrating its inanities with the lofty dignity of the 
Homeric epic, he insensibly leads us to measure this petty 
world by the large standards of the heroic age. Yet the 
poem is not only a satire on the trivial; it affects us also 
as a travesty on the sublime, and its wit consists largely 
in placing the sacred or the admirable on a seeming equality 
with the trifling or the absurd. We are amused because 
all ordinary standards are changed, because we hear in 
the same breath of the State-counsels and the tea-drinking 
of a Queen, of the deaths of husbands and of lap-dogs, of 
the neglect of prayers, and the loss of a masquerade. In 
the Gulliver's Travels of Swift, Pope's great contemporary, 
we are entertained by the upsetting of our fixed ideas of 
physical relations; we see a man become a giant among 
pygmies, a pygmy among giants; in The Rape of the Lock 
we are entertained by a similar reversal of our moral and 
spiritual ideas, and in its tolerant cynicism the petty 
becomes great, the great petty. 

The Rape of the Lock was followed by Windsor Forest 
and other short poems; and about 1713 Pope settled down 

in earnest to the great task of his middle life, the 
of Homer! n translation of Homer. We cannot but admire the 

spirit which prompted this undertaking. Pope's 
father was old, and the family fortunes were not prosper- 
ing; so the poet turned from original work to the more 
profitable task of translation. At first he was depressed 
by the magnitude and difficulty of his undertaking; and 



332 THE AGE OF POPE. 

it shows the force and endurance of the man that, in spite 
of a frail body and a very imperfect knowledge of Greek, 
he should have pushed it through to a successful conclu- 
sion. Every one knows the verdict on this work of the 
great scholar Dr. Bentley: "A very pretty poem, Mr. 
Pope, but not Homer." In repeating this, we are too apt 
to forget that the first part of the criticism is as true as the 
last. Quite apart from its value as a translation, Pope's 
Homer is "a very pretty poem," and thousands have read 
it with delight. 

Pope made about five or six thousand pounds by his 
translation of the Iliad alone, a very large sum for those 
days; and he determined to invest a part of 
this money in a house and grounds at Twicken- 
ham, on the bank of the Thames, about twelve miles above 
London. There were woods and a lawn sloping to the 
river; and the poet delighted to cultivate and adorn his 
grounds, and to dress nature "to advantage." He built 
a tunnel under the public road that ran through his place 
and called it his "grotto." On the walls and roof of this 
"grotto" were stuck shells, "pieces of looking-glass," bits 
of spar, and fragments of ores and lava. He had also a 
temple "wholly composed of shells in the rustic man- 
ner." * In this famous retreat at Twickenham, where 
nature was polished by art, and incrusted with glitter- 
ing ornaments, this poet of the artificial held his court. 
Here came John Gay, the poet, and the great and ter- 
rible Dean Swift; here, Pope tells us, the brilliant Lord 
Bolingbroke, "nobly pensive," meditated in his "Egerian 
grot." 2 

For more than ten years (cir. 1713-1725), Pope had given 
his time and effort almost entirely to his work as transla- 

1 Pope : Letters. 

2 See his poem On his Grotto at Twickenham Composed of Marbles, 
Spars, Gems, Ores, and Minerals. 



POPE. 333 

tor and commentator. 1 His long task faithfully done, came 
to an end in 1725 with the completion of his translation of 
the Odyssey, and the appearance of his edition of Shakes- 
peare. At thirty-seven he had made his fortune and his 
reputation, and he was in a position to write what he 
pleased. But Pope's success had excited the envy of less 
fortunate authors ; his disposition, and in part his religion, 
had made him many enemies; while he, on his side, with 
his insatiable vanity and his high-strung organisation, was 
easily touched to passionate resentment. Unfortunately, 
one of the first uses he made of his liberty was to attack his 
mv „ . „ adversaries, many of whom were beneath no- 

The Dunciad. . .,.'„ J . - . 7 

tice, in his famous satire of the Dunciad, or, 
Epic of the Dunces. In its plan the Dunciad bears some 
resemblance to Dryden's Mac Flecknoe; but it shows more 
personal spite, and less careless power. D^den regards 
his victim with an air of assured superiority and amused 
unconcern, but Pope shrieks out his unsavoury abuse as 
one who engages in a street-fight on equal terms. He piti- 
lessly uncovers the miseries of the obscure literary hack, 
starving in his garret; "he revels," says Thackeray, "in 
base descriptions of poor men's want." 2 "What paving- 
stones," exclaims Taine, "to crush flies!" 3 If Pope's 
enemies were as contemptible as he would have us believe, 
why was it necessary to put forth so much strength against 
them? The question suggests to us the inherent weakness 
of the poem; it employs satire rather as an instrument of 
revenge in a private quarrel than as a corrector of any pub- 
lic wrong. As Dr. Johnson very sensibly observes : " Whom 

1 Pope writes of this with regret: 

"Gay dies unpensioned, with a hundred friends; 
Hibernian politics, O Swift! thy fate; 
And Pope's, ten years to comment and translate. " 
Dunciad, end of Bk. iii. 

2 English Humourists: "Prior, Gay, and Pope." 

3 History of English Literature, Bk, iii. p. 352. (Van Laun's trans.) 



334 THE AGE OF POPE. 

did it concern to know that one scribbler or another was a 
dunce? W1 A poem "on dunces," the great doctor once said 
contemptuously, and then turned to poor Boswell and 
added: "It was worth while being a dunce then. Ah, sir, 
hadst thou lived in those days! " 2 

The closing period of Pope's literary career contains some 
of his strongest and maturest work : his philosophical poem, 
_ The Essay on Man, The Moral Essays, the Imi- 

tations of Horace, and The Epistle to Dr. Arbuth- 
not. These poems are full of apt sayings; they show the 
poet's wonderful instinct for the memorable phrase. Pope 
was not a profound, consistent, or original thinker; but he 
had something which may fairly be called wisdom, — the 
wisdom of a close, if superficial, observer of life and man- 
ners, as he knew them in the club, the drawing-room, and 
the street. 

In Pope this practical wisdom of the man of the world is 
touched at times with a true nobility; and among much 
that is misanthropic and cynical we come upon thoughts 
like these: 

"Honour and shame from no condition rise; 
Act well your part, there all the honour lies." 3 

"Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow; 
The rest is all but leather or prunella." * 

Even nobler than these is that beautiful rule of life, in 
which he tells us that we should keep the equal mind — 

' Never elated when one man's oppress'd ; 
Never dejected while another's bless'd." 5 

The chief work of Pope's last years was the addition of a 
fourth book to the Dunciad, which is justly celebrated for 

1 Lives of the Poets, "Pope." 

2 Boswell's Johnson, vol. ii. p. 96 (B. Hill's edition). 
s IV. Epistle of the Essay on Man. 

4 IV. Epistle of the Essay on Man. 
6 IV. Epistle of the Essay on Man. 



POPE. 335 

its magnificent close. His feeble frame was shaken by ill- 
ness and the end was at hand. He died quietly in his villa 
in 1744, and was buried in the Twickenham church near 
the monument he had erected to his parents. 

It is almost impossible for readers and critics of this gen- 
eration to be fair to Pope, either as a poet or as a man. To 
Pope the most of us he is the spokesman of a dead time, 
spokesman separated from ours by the most fundamental 
o is ime. djff erences } n j^ s ij ea i s f literature and of life. 
So absolutely is he bound up with that time that we must 
try to enter it in imagination if we would understand and 
sympathise with its typical poet. He set its world of 
fashion before us in The Rape of the Lock, he unveiled the 
jealousy, recriminations, and wretchedness of its literary 
class in the Dunciad, he made himself the mouthpiece of 
one of its leading philosophers in the Essay on Man. He 
illustrates its desire for perfection of style, its cynical dis- 
belief in the possibility of virtue in man or woman. His 
world was narrow and ignoble; but, such as it was, he 
interpreted it with the minuteness and truth of a great 
artist. We must not forget that the wide world of poetry 
includes many different kinds of excellence, and that there 
is room in it for Juvenal, the satirist of corrupt Rome, as 
well as for Dante, the seer and the prophet. So we must 
grant to Pope his place and his praise ; not because he wrote 
the noblest or the highest kind of poetry, but because he 
fills his own place, and does his own work honestly and 
well. 

When we turn from Pope's writings to the man himself, 
we hesitate between contempt and pity. He was greedy for 

praise, inordinately vain, and painfully sensitive 
aoter 1 ^ ^° crrt icism; when his self-love was wounded he 

retaliated with petty malice, rare even in the his 
tory of genius. He resorted to equivocations, or direct false- 
hood, to advance his reputation; he delighted in underhand 



336 THE AGE OF POPE. 

methods and small intrigues, so that, in the famous phrase, 
"he hardly drank tea without a stratagem." Yet he 
was neither cold-hearted nor selfish; he did many acts of 
kindness; he had loyal friends; he loved his parents and 
tended them with a touching and beautiful devotion. 1 He 
had a brave, independent spirit; he fought, an invalid, 
against the world, a cripple, but with the heart of a soldier. 
There is much in his life that cannot be tolerated or 
defended, but there is also something to admire. We are 
very gentle over the diseased and puny bod}^ — shall we 
fail in pity for the warped nature, the morbid soul? 

Some Minor Poets of Pope's Time. 

Three poets, Matthew Prior (1664-1721), John Gay 
(1688-1732), and Thomas Parnell (1679-1717) were more 
or less closely associated with Pope and his circle of wits. 
In two of them at least, Prior and Gay, we find that levity 
of disposition and easy good-humour which distinguish their 
time. 

Matthew, or "Matt" Prior, as he was familiarly called, 
was of humble origin. As a boy he acted as assistant 
Matthew in his uncle's wine-house in London, and there 
Pnor - attracted the attention of the Earl of Dorset by 

his fondness for Horace. Through the kindness of the Earl, 
he was placed at school at Westminster; and after gradu- 
ating from Cambridge, he made his way in the world as 
courtier, diplomatist, and poet. He was a man of slight, 
worldly nature, not inclined to let any devotion to a prin- 

1 This is beautifully expressed in these famous lines at the close of 
his Epistle to Dr. Arbuihnot: 

"Me, let the tender office long engage, 
To rock the cradle of reposing age, 
With lenient arts extend a mother's breath, 
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death, 
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, 

. And keep awhile one parent from the sky." 



MINOR POETS. 337 

ciple or a party stand in the way of his own advancement, 
and he was merry in good company. With no depth of 
feeling, he took life lightly and superficially, enjoying its 
pleasures. But Prior had the true artist's gift of expres- 
sion. As a man he was probably no better than many 
another flippant trifler of his day; but he was a poet, with 
a poet's power of telling the world what he felt and saw 
through art. Nearly all of his best poems are the expres- 
sion of that gay, cynical, easy-going philosophy which 
would avoid anything that is serious, Oi' would turn life 
into a jest. In the one instance in which he tried to be 
serious and sublime, in his ambitious work, Solomon on 
the Vanity of the World, he became dull and tedious; and 
we feel that the laborious verses are forced and perfunc- 
tory. But in his wayward, fanciful poem of Alma; or, The 
Progress of the Mind (1718), a careless, rambling, clever 
dialogue on the relations of soul and body, the real man, 
"Matt" Prior, seems revealed to us; and we are charmed 
with that inimitable union of ease and grace, liveliness 
and cynicism, with which he delights us in his happiest 
moods. This neatness and finish of execution make him 
a master of the epigram, and give to many of his slight 
verses on every-day themes an unmistakable tone of ele- 
gance and distinction. This, indeed, is Prior's peculiar 
excellence. He had, as the poet Cowper long ago pointed 
out, 1 the happy faculty of being familiar and colloquial 
without descending to the level of the commonplace or the 
prosaic. By virtue of this rare gift, he is one of the greatest 
masters in English of the lighter forms of verse. 

John Gay was a friend of Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke, 

who treated him, according to Dr. Johnson, "with more 

fondness than respect." 2 He loved comfort 

and good eating; he was indolent and kindly, 

or, in Dr. Johnson's words, "a soft and civil companion." 3 

1 Letter to Rev. William Unwin, Jan. 17, 1782. 

a Lives oi the Poets* "Gay/' * Lives of the Poets, "Gay" 



338 THE AGE OF POPE. 

Pope describes him as a man " of a timid temper and fear- 
ful of giving offence to the great." i As we should expect, 
the poetry of this good, easy man is not of the highest 
order. His Fables (1727), short moral stories in smooth 
and easy verse, are often clever and amusing. In this he 
is the follower of the French poet La Fontaine; and, while 
he does not equal his original, he has probably produced 
the best work of this order in English literature. Two of 
his songs have been much admired, " 'T was when the seas 
were roaring," and "Sweet William's Farewell to Black- 
ey'd Susan." The first of these is distinctly superior to 
the second, but neither is worthy to be placed with our best 
lyrics. Probably Gay is at his best in his description of 
certain outward aspects of the life about him. He was a 
close observer, with a quick eye for trifles; he did not see 
beneath the surface, but he has given us wonderfully 
minute and vivid pictures of his world as it appeared to 
the passer-by. He has the same careful, uninspired fidelity 
to commonplace facts, which some old Dutch painters 
show in their pictures of the interior of a butcher's shop 
or a tavern. His poem of Trivia, or the art of walking the 
streets of London (1715), is a perfect treasure-house of in- 
formation for the student of dress and manners; and, even 
in his pastoral poem The Shepherd's Week (1714), we come 
upon a careful and interesting account of certain rural cus- 
toms and superstitions. But Gay, like Pope and most of 
the great writers of the time, was only accurate within cer- 
tain narrow limits, for we cannot really see those things 
which lie beyond the range of our understanding and our 
sympathy. So restricted were men's sympathies in this 
age, so contracted was their field of vision, that they saw 
and described most clearly the frivolous or the trivial, the 
artificial or the base. Pope, Gay, and Prior were marvel- 
lously truthful to the facts they saw, but there was a world 

1 Spence's Anecdotes. 



GAY. 339 

outside of these facts of which they knew nothing. So, 
Beaiism in when Pope writes of the beauty of Nature, he 
Pope and relies on books, and is affected and conventional; 
arort ' but, when he describes a game of cards, he paints 
from the life. We may then properly inquire, not only 
whether a poet describes facts truly, but also what kind of 
facts he describes. When Wordsworth, the great poet of 
Nature, writes : 

"The silence that is in the starry sky, 
The sleep that is among the lonely hills/' l 

he reveals something to us about Nature that, obvious as 
it may seem, could only have been learned through sym- 
pathy. Such were the facts this poet saw and described. 
In the following passage in Trivia, Gay is equally accurate 
and far more specific : 

"If when Fleet-ditch with muddy current flows 
You chance to roam; where oyster-tubs in rows 
Are ranged beside the posts ; then stay thy haste, 
And with the savoury fish indulge thy taste: 
The damsel's knife the gaping shell commands 
While the salt liquor streams between her hands." 

Such were the facts that the eighteenth-century realist 
delighted to describe. 

Thomas Parnell, an Irishman of good family, was, like 
Gay, the friend of Pope, Swift, and the other great writers 

of his time. He died at thirty-nine, and nearly 
Parnell. all of his best work was composed during the 

last six years of his life, the years during which 
he had the advantage of Pope's advice and encouragement. 
He wrote but little, and even within these narrow limits he 
is seldom at his best. Yet some of Parnell's poems, The 
Hermit, A Night Piece on Death, A Hymn to Contentment, 

1 Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, 



340 THE AGE OF POPE. 

and perhaps a few others, show the spirit of a true poet; 
and we find in them traces of a higher mood and a deeper 
feeling than in all the verse of Gay or Prior. A greater 
seriousness, an appreciation of natural beauty, slight as it 
may seem compared with the Nature poets of a later time, 
make us feel that Parnell stands apart from his greatest 
poetic contemporaries, anticipating, if only in a faint and 
hesitating way, the spirit of the age which is to come. 

Authorship in the Augustan Age and the Rise of 
the New Prose. 

One of the important features in the literary history of 
England, during the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth 
centuries, is the change which took place in the 
in the pofi- position of the man of letters. Before this time 
tionof the ft had been almost impossible to make a living 
by writing, unless one wrote for the stage. Mar- 
lowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, nearly all the writers who 
supported themselves entirely by the pen, were dramatists, 
while those who were not dramatists were not entirely de- 
pendent on what they earned by their literary work. Thus 
Hooker was a clergyman, Sir Thomas Browne a physician, 
Izaak Walton a linen-draper; while Wyatt and Surrey, Sid- 
ney and Raleigh, represent the large class of courtiers and 
gentlemen to whom literature was not a profession but an 
occasional pursuit. Even in the latter half of the seven- 
teenth century, Dryden felt himself forced to write plays 
for a livelihood, although convinced that his talents lay 
in another direction. The explanation of this is very 
simple; writing did not pay as a profession, because there 
were so few readers; play-writing paid, because many 
crowded to the theatres who would not or could not read 
a book. 

After the Revolution of 1688, authorship offered far greater 



CONDITION OF THE AUTHOR. S41 

chances of worldly advancement ; and it became possible for 
a writer to make a career for himself through 
authorsSp literature, without being compelled to write for 
of the Revo- the stage. This was not because the number of 
I688 n ° readers had begun to increase, although this was 
in fact the case; it was because the government, 
finding literature useful in guiding or forming public opinion, 
employed authors to write in its service, and rewarded them 
with a pension, an embassy, or some public office. This 
practice may have been partly due to the example of Dry- 
den, who had showed by his political satires and by his 
timely advocacy of the Roman Church, how strong an in- 
fluence literature could exert on the public mind; but it 
was largety brought about by the political condition of 
affairs after the Revolution had placed William and Mary 
upon the throne. It will be remembered that these sove- 
reigns and their successors did not rule by a "Divine 
right/' as the Stuarts had claimed to do, but derived their 
authority from the will of the Parliament. Under such 
circumstances, it is not surprising that the power of the 
crown declined, and that the control of affairs passed more 
and more into the hands of the great political leaders and 
their followers. The result was an eager contest for power 
between the two great political parties, the Whig and the 
Tory. Each looked to the public for support, and each 
realised that capable writers could do much to win the pub- 
lic to its side. Such a state of things could not but bring 
about a great change in the author's position. Men of 
letters had their share in the work of the government; 
they were brought into frequent contact with the govern- 
ing class; and the successful writer, treated as an equal by 
great nobles and leading statesmen, obtained a comfort- 
able income through official patronage. This alliance of 
literature and politics was particularly marked in the reign 
of Queen Anne (1702-1714), and men of letters were so 



842 THE AGE OF POPE. 

highly honoured that men compared this brilliant and 
favoured period to the Golden Age of Latin literature under 
the Emperor Augustus, and called it proudly the "Augus- 
tan Age." Among many authors rewarded by the gov- 
ernment at this time, were the poet Prior, who was 
connected with various diplomatic missions ; Swift, who was 
made Dean; and Addison, who rose to the high post of 
Secretary of State. 

But, while literature was thus largely dependent upon 
political patronage, or the favour of some distinguished 
„, .. patron to whom the struggling author dedicated 

The growth f . , , , . . , , . , 

of the read- his book, the increase in the reading-class was 
mg public. a l r eady preparing- the way for a yet greater and 
more lasting change. Ever since the Restoration the 
wealth of the nation had steadily increased. Trade with 
the Colonies grew rapidly; and, as the commercial class 
became wealthier, it gained in social and political impor- 
tance. Dean Swift remarked that the political power 
which used to be monopolised by the great land-owners 
"had gone over to money," and Dr. Johnson declared that 
"an English merchant was a new species of gentleman." 
Formerly there had been very few readers outside of the 
aristocratic or scholarly circles, but now, as the commercial 
class increased in wealth and consequence, the number 
of those who bought and read books increased also. This 
gradual widening of the popular intelligence was in time 
to make the author independent of both the state and the 
patron, and enable him to look directly to the great mass of 
readers for recognition and support. 

Other influences besides the spread of education were? 
slowly and silently adding to the great army of readers. 
The freedom ^he establishment of the freedom of the press, 
of the press, in 1695, opened the way to a fuller and freer 
1695 * discussion of public questions, and led to the 

foundation of numerous newspapers and periodicals, read 



CONDITION OF THE AUTHOR. 343 

by many who never opened the larger and more formidable 
works. London was the natural centre of this- 
houses" 66 " m teH ec fri a l activity; and in London the Coffee- 
houses, the meeting-places of statesmen, wits, 
merchants, and fashionable idlers, did much to quicken 
and enlarge the mental life of the town. The first Coffee- 
house in England had been started about the middle of 
the seventeenth century, and by Queen Anne's time, 
Coffee-houses had become an established and important 
feature of London life. One writer estimated that in 1708 
there were nearly three thousand of these Coffee-houses in 
London alone. The Coffee-house resembled the modern 
club; but it was less expensive, less exclusive, and less 
luxurious. There the Londoner gossiped with his friends, 
read and wrote his letters, and enjoyed his coffee and his 
pipe. We can imagine the effect of the incessant dis- 
cussions, daily, almost hourly, carried on in these thou- 
sands of places of public resort. In these Coffee-houses, 
writes a foreign observer, "you have all manner of News; 
you have a good Fire, which you may sit by as long as 
you please; you have a Dish of Coffee, you meet your 
friends for the Transaction of Business, and all for a penny, 
if you don't care to spend more." 1 

All these conditions, political, commercial, or social, 

favoured the rise of a new kind of prose literature, and 

tended to give prose a wider influence. The 

The rise of the p i •■ i ,• 1 , ,1 i 

new prose. professional writer, no longer tied to the drama, 
was free to devote himself to prose ; and it was 
prose, in its shorter, lighter, and more amusing forms, that 
the new public found the easiest and most entertaining 
reading. So, as we shall see, periodicals were started, con- 
taining brief essays, sketches, and sometimes stories; and 
these pleased the taste of the town. Sometimes these essays 
pictured, in a few numbers, some aspect of the life of the 
1 Misson, a French traveller, who visited England in 1713 (?). 



344 THE AGE OF POPE. 

day; sometimes they caught the floating talk of the clubs 
and Coffee-houses, and gave it a brief, graceful, and witty 
literary form. In the hands of great writers this new prose 
became a powerful social and educational force; but to 
appreciate this better we must turn to two of the great 
masters of the essay, Addison and Steele. 



SIR RICHARD STEELE. 

(1672-1729.) 

"He was unswerving in his loyalty to his friends; he was the most 
loving of fathers; and, in days when marriage was a lighter tie than 
now, his devotion to his wife may be called romantic. There have 
been wiser, stronger, greater men. But many a strong man would 
have been stronger for a touch of Steele's indulgent sympathy; many a 
great man has wanted his genuine largeness of heart; many a wise 
man might learn something from his deep and wide humanity. His 
virtues redeemed his frailties." 

— Austin Dobson. 

"If Steele is. not our friend, he is nothing. He is by no means the 
most brilliant of wits nor the deepest of thinkers; but he is our friend: 
we love him as children love their love with an A, because he is 
amiable." — Thackeray. 

Thackeray spoke truly when he called Steele "our 
friend." With Goldsmith, he is one of the most lovable 
of English authors. He had his weaknesses, although 
they have been greatly exaggerated; but they were the 
faults of a warm-hearted, heedless nature, essentially high- 
minded and noble, and full of a sincere and beautiful 
humility of spirit. It is easy to love Steele, but men are 
just beginning to see that even this is not enough; they 
are beginning to see more clearly how great a work this 
man did for England, careless and easy-going as he seems; 
what a depth of love and tenderness there was in him, how 
lofty was the purpose which animated his life from first to 
last; and, as they see this, they know that there is some- 



STEELE. 345 

thing in him that not only wins our love, but commands 
our respect and admiration. 

Richard Steele, or "Dick" Steele, as his friends called 
him, was born in Dublin in 1672, the year of the birth of 
Addison, the great writer whose name was to 
be so closely associated with his own. The 
Steeles were English, and it may be that he inherited 
his excitable, generous, and loving nature from his mother, 
who is supposed to have been of Irish descent. When he 
was very young he was left an orphan, and was cared for 
by an uncle, who secured his admission to the Charter- 
house School in London. In one of his essays Steele tells 
of the impression his father's death made upon his child- 
ish mind. He was then too young to realise what had 
happened, but some vague "instinct of sorrow" reached 
him through his mother's grief; this, he writes, "seized 
my very soul, and has made pity the weakness of my heart 
ever since. " l 

From the Charterhouse, where he began his long 
friendship with Addison, Steele went to Oxford; but left, 
before taking his degree, to enlist in the Horse Guards. 
According to his own account, he lost the succession to 
"a very good estate" in Ireland, by this step, sacrificing, 
as always, his prospects to the inclination of the moment. 
By 1700 he was Captain Steele, had published verses, and 
had made the acquaintance of some of the wits of the town. 
The life was full of temptations, especially for a young 
officer of an improvident and emotional disposition and 
high spirits, and these temptations Steele did not always 
successfully resist. His life in truth was far better than 
that of many of the men about him; but, unlike many 
others, he was quick to repent of a fault, and ready to 
confess it with a singular frankness. So, he tells us, "he 
writ for his own private use, a little book called the 

1 Taller, No. 181, June 6, 1710. 



346 THE AGE OF POPE. 

Christian Hero, with a design principally to fix upon his own 

Mind a strong Impression of Virtue and Religion, 
Hero hnStian m PP° s iti° n to a stronger Propensity towards 

unwarrantable Pleasures." 1 This book was 
designed to show "that no Principles but those of religion 
are sufficient to make a great man." 2 Many of the noblest 
traits of Steele's character are unconsciously revealed in the 
book, but it did not add to his popularity. It was incon- 
venient, moreover, if he indulged in "the least levity" to 
be accused of falling below the standard which he had set 
up. To counteract this, and "to enliven his character," 
he wrote a comedy called The Funeral, which 
was followed by several other plays. These 
plays are not without merit, and some of them were at 
least fairly successful in their day; but it is not by his 
dramas that Steele holds his place in literature. One 
feature of these comedies, however, can not be altogether 
passed over, if we are to rightly estimate the ruling spirit 
of their author's life; they are the work of a man who 
has set himself to purify the thoughts and correct the 
vulgarity and wickedness of his age. Steele's life-long pur- 
pose is to separate wit from immorality, to show that a good 

man is neither a milksop nor a sanctimonious 
reformer. hypocrite, and that it is possible to be decent 

without being dull. This purpose is apparent 
in his comedies, which are pure and wholesome compared 
to those of Wycherley, Congreve, or the other dramatists 
of the Restoration. He did not condemn the stage out- 
right, as some reformers then did; but he tried to elevate 
it, believing, as he wrote, "that a good play, acted before 
a well-bred Audience, must raise very proper Incite- 
ments to good Behaviour, and be the most quick and 

1 Mr. Steele's Apology for Himself and His Writings; Occasioned by 
his Expulsion from the House of Commons, 1714. 

2 Title-page to the Christian Hero. 



STEELE. 347 

prevailing method of giving Young People a Turn of 
Sense and Breeding." "I own myself," he adds, "of 
the Society for Reformation of Manners." 1 But to this 
needed reform Steele, like his great co-worker Addison, 
brought not merely enthusiasm, but taste, humour, and 
the experience of the man of the world. Since the ac- 
cession of William and Mary the better side of the English 
nature had been fighting against the moral corruption 
which had disfigured society after the Restoration: asso- 
ciations had been formed for the Reformation of Manners, 
and Collier had filed his sweeping indictment against the 
stage. But now vice and folly were to be arrested by 
two writers whose weapons were to prove more effective 
than the angriest invective, writers whose playful humour 
could make frivolity ridiculous, whose kindly satire pro- 
voked no resentment, and insensibly enlisted the readers' 
sympathies on the side of virtue. 

In 1707 Steele was put in charge of the Gazette. This 
newspaper was the official organ of the Government, 
through which it gave the public such news as it 
Th^Tatier ' thought expedient, and Steele's position was con- 
sequently a government post. In 1709 he started 
a periodical of his own, the Tatler, an event which we look 
back upon as the beginning of a new era in the history of 
English prose. The conditions which favoured the rise of 
newspapers and periodicals at this time have been already 
alluded to (p. 342). The first successful daily newspaper, 
the Daily Courant, had been begun in 1702; and in 1704 
Daniel De Foe started a paper called the Review, which 
began as a weekly, and which, besides articles on such 
serious subjects as books and politics, devoted some space 
to lighter topics and the social gossip of the town. Besides 
these papers there were many others ; the power of the 
press and the demand for news was increasing, and there 

1 Tatler, No. 3, April 14, 1709 



348 THE AGE OF POPE. 

was a great opportunity for the writer who could satisfy 
this demand and lift journalism to a higher level. Steele 
was the first writer to seize this opportunity. The Tatler 
was so far in advance of any of its predecessors that we now 
look back to it as the first of those famous eighteenth-cen- 
tury periodicals which were to become a distinctive feature 
in the literary history of the century. If we could place 
a copy of the Tatler beside one of our huge, well-printed 
dailies, this famous periodical would look almost ridicu- 
lously mean and insignificant. It consisted of but one folio 
sheet, with 'double columns; and was published three times 
a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the days 
when the mail left London for the country. It was sold 
for a penny, and, in addition to the theatre notices and 
current news, it contained an essay which often treated 
lightly and good-humouredly of some folly or affectation of 
the time. Shabby as this little paper would seem to us 
now, it did a wonderful work in purifying the town; and 
it gave us essays which have kept their charm and fresh- 
ness for nearly two hundred years, while the wisest and 
cleverest articles in our imposing modern journals hardly 
outlast the day. The success of the Tatler was immedi- 
ate; Queen Anne read it at the breakfast table; and it 
was said to have attracted more customers to the coffee- 
houses "than all the other News Papers put together." 1 
Before long Steele's old friend Addison began to write for 
the Tatler, and after it had run for about a year and a 
half, became a regular contributor. Thus the two greatest 
essayists and reformers of the day, sharing the same 
high purpose, and united by an almost life-long friendship, 
came to work side by side. The Tatler was discon- 
tinued January second, 1711 ; and on the first of the follow- 
ing March, Addison and Steele started a yet more famous 
periodical, the Spectator, which appeared every day except 

1 This was said by John Gay in 1711. See Dobson's Steele, p. 124, 



STEELE. 349 

Sunday. As we shall have something to say about the 
Spectator in our study of Addison, we may return now to 
the story of Steele's life. He was an ardent Whig; and, like 

many of the leading writers of his day, he took 
activity! an ac ^i ye P art m politics. We need not follow 

him into this region of political controversy; it is 
enough to say that from about 1713 not a little of his life 
and energy was absorbed by political affairs, or taken up 
with attempts to extricate himself from money difficulties 
in which he was continually involved. He had stoutly de- 
fended the succession of the House of Hanover, and when 
George I. came to the throne he was knighted (1715) and 
rewarded with several lucrative offices. But sanguine, care- 
less, and improvident, he struggled with debts to the end. 
In 1724 he left London and retired to a country-place in 
Wales, broken in health. Since he had left Oxford some 

thirty years before, he had lived in the thick of 
an^deathJ* the contest, playing his part in that world of the 

capital, in which the activities of the whole nation 
were focussed. He had been soldier, dramatist, government 
official, editor, politician, and theatrical manager; he had 
been intimate with the greatest Englishmen of his time; 
he had known success and disappointment, praise and 
abuse; and he had fought a brave fight, not always wise or 
prudent, but true, on the whole, to high ideals; and, in some 
wonderful way he had kept his hopeful spirit and kind 
heart through it all. The last glimpse that we get of him 
at the close of his hurried and bustling life is very beauti- 
ful. "I have been told," wrote one of his friends, "that 
he retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last ; and 
would often be carried out in a summer's evening, when 
the country lads and lasses were assembled at their rural 
sports, and, with his pencil, give an order on his agent, the 
mercer, for a new gown for the best dancer." * So the quiet 

1 Original Letters, Dramatic Pieces, and Poems, by Benjamin Victor, 
i p. 330. 



350 THE AGE OF POPE. 

hour was given him at the end of the day. He died in 
1729. 

In Steele's writings, and especially in his letters, we see 

the man as he was. He wrote frankly and carelessly, and 

he was transparently honest and direct. His 

Character. L J 

unaffected goodness, his large-hearted human 
sympathy, shine out through his works. We see in them 
a man of a sincerely religious nature, who loved his fellows, 
who had a chivalric reverence for women, who was tender 
towards suffering, deA^oted to his wife and children, loyal 
to his friends. He had high standards, and was quick to 
blame himself when he fell below them. His faults were 
those of a generous and impulsive nature ; and we must not 
make too much of them, but remember that he confessed 
frankly what many a man would have tried to conceal. 
"I shall not carry my humility so far as to call myself a 
virtuous man," he writes, "but at the same time must con- 
fess that my life is at best but pardonable." How many 
are there who could not truly say so much, what truly good 
man would dare to say more? 

His writings are unequal, and every one agrees that they 
lack the peculiar charm and finish of Addison's; but their 
purpose is as high, their pathos at times warmer 
' and deeper. It was Steele, moreover, who led. 
the way in which Addison followed, who originated what 
Addison brought to perfection. Steele himself has told us 
in no measured terms how much he owed to Addison, and 
critic after critic has repeated his generous words; but we 
must not forget the debt that Addison owed to Steele, that 
it was Steele who gave Addison the greatest opportunity 
for distinction, and Steele who enabled Addison to give the 
world his best. We may then respect Steele, knowing 
what he did and what he was. When Pope sneered and 
Swift railed at men with a savage hatred, Steele passed 
through a rough world with an overflowing charity, striv- 



ADDISON. 351 

ing to make men better. "As for my labours," he writes, 
" if they wear but one impertinence out of human life, des- 
troy a single vice, or give a morning's cheerfulness to an 
honest mind; in short, if the world can be but one virtue the 
better or in any degree less vicious, or receive from them 
the smallest addition to their innocent diversions; I shall 
not think my pains, or indeed my life, to have been spent 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 

(1672-1719.) 

"He has restored virtue to its dignity, and taught innocence not to 
be ashamed. This is an elevation of literary character, above all 
Greek, above all Roman fame. . . . Whoever wishes to attain an 
English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, 
must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." 

— Dr. Johnson. 

Joseph Addison, one of the most charming of English 

prose-writers, and one of the wisest and most kindly of 

social reformers, was born at his father's rec- 

Ear y years. ^ at Milgtorij Wiltshire, in 1672. His father, 

who became Dean of Lichfield Cathedral, was a kindly 
scholar of some literary ability, and Addison's earliest im- 
pressions of life were gained in a loving, refined, and happy 
home. He went to the Charterhouse School, where he 
formed his memorable friendship with "Dick" Steele, and 
thence to Oxford, where he obtained a scholarship at Mag- 
dalen College through some Latin verses on King William 
the Third. He had a liking for Latin literature; and his 
fellow-students are said to have thought him shy, studious, 
and reserved. The Church seemed the natural career 
for a young man of Addison's position and character, but 
an unforeseen opportunity turned the course of his life in 
another direction. He had written some verses to Dryden 

1 The Tatler, No, 89. 



352 THE AGE OF POPE. 

(1693), which had pleased the old poet, then in the height 
of his fame; and shortly after he was brought to the notice 
of two leaders of the Whig party, Charles Montague, after- 
wards Lord Halifax, and John (afterwards Lord) Somers. 
These two statesmen, anxious no doubt to secure a prom- 
ising young writer for the party, obtained a pension for 
Addison, which he was to use in foreign travel in prepara- 
tion for a public career. Accordingly, in 1699 he left for 
the Continent, visiting France, Italy, and Switzerland, 
writing a little and observing much. But the political 
changes which followed the King's death in 1702 lost 
Addison his pension, and he returned home in the follow- 
ing year with no certain prospects, and, as Dr. -Johnson 
quaintly says, "at full leisure for the cultivation of his 
mind." x But it was not long before Addison's opportu- 
nity came. In 1704, Marlborough, the most brilliant sol- 
dier of the age, won the battle of Blenheim; 
^ am " and Lord Godolphin —then Lord High Treasurer 
— asked Halifax, Addison's old patron, to rec- 
. ommend some poet to him who could fittingly celebrate 
the victory. At Halif ax's suggestion Addison was selected ; 
and the man who was acting as the head of Her Majesty's 
government sent the Right Honourable Chancellor of the 
Exchequer to wait on the poor author in his garret, 2 and 
ask him to write the poem. 

Remember that at this time Addison's friends were out 
of power; that he was miserably poor and almost unknown. 
Could there be a more impressive illustration of the way 
in which politics turned to literature, or of the respect 
which the author was beginning to command? The Cam- 
paign, the poem which Addison wrote in response to this 
request, pleased Lord Godolphin and the public. It was 
through his poetry that Addison had first attracted the 

1 Lives of the Poets, "Addison." 

2 Pope says that Addison was lodged up three pair of stairs, over 
a small shop in the Haymarket. See Spence's Anecdotes, 



ADDISON. 353 

attention of the Whig leaders and laid the foundations of 
his fortune, and now poetry came a second time to his aid. 
As a reward for his services to the party, he was made one 
of the Commissioners of the Excise, that is of the domestic 
taxes (1704), and from this time until 1710, when the 
Whigs went out of office, he held various government posts. 
Shortly before this, as we have seen, he became a con- 
tributor to Steele's new enterprise, the Tatler, finding- 
through his friend a fresh and congenial field for 
th £Yatiei\! h^ s talents, and entering on what was to prove 
his most brilliant and useful sphere of work. 
In the succeeding periodical, the Spectator (1711), his fine 
qualities are seen at their best. 

The wonderful essays in these periodicals, and in a few 
others of their kind, performed for the English of the eigh- 
teenth century the same service which Hamlet 
kai essays" sa ^ tne pl avers did for the sixteenth; they were 
the "abstract and brief chronicle of the time." 
The world read them, and saw itself reflected in the mirror 
of art. Others had held up mirrors to life, — Chaucer the 
poet, to his world of the fourteenth century ; Shakespeare 
the dramatist, to his world of the sixteenth; and now in 
the early eighteenth-century world come the essayists also, 
holding up in their turn their mirror to the human comedy 
about them. And that world remains ; reflected in these little 
essays, slight and trifling as they seem, not only for the men 
of the generation that produced them, but for us also, if 
we read them with sympathetic understanding. It is full 
of men and women more real to us than many of the great 
personages of history: the immortal country squire, the 
amiable and eccentric Sir Roger de Coverley; Will Honey- 
comb, the elderly man of gallantry; Sir Andrew Freeport, 
the representative of the rising merchant-class ; and poor, 
aimless, idle Will Wimble. There, too, is Ned Softly, haunt- 
ing the coffee-houses for a chance to read his verses; Tom 



854 THE AGE OF POPE. 

Folio, the pedantic bibliographer, the type of those who 
glorify the outward details of scholarship, while incapable 
of appreciating its spirit; and Addison himself, the Specta- 
tor, the shy, silent man, who sits by and watches and re- 
cords it all. There are all these and many more painted 
with such truth and distinctness that, like the pilgrims of 
Chaucer's worthy company, they remain the living repre- 
sentatives of their time. And it is to be observed that the 
typical characters brought before us in these essays 
country in are chosen and presented so as to represent the 
the De Cov- life of the country as well as that of the town. 
' Indeed, the Sir Roger de Coverley series is so clev- 
erly planned that it constant^ suggests to us the ever widen- 
ing differences between town and country life and ideas 
in Addison's time. We see the Londoner, the Spectator, 
visit the country, and we view it through his eyes; we see 
the country squire, Sir Roger, come up to town and appre- 
ciate by his old-fashioned dress, and his ludicrous mis- 
takes, how swiftly the capital has moved away from the 
simple-minded, narrow, conservative world that surrounds 
it. So the whole thing is a skilful and vivid study in con- 
trasts. Such studies of life and character were varied by 
essays of other kinds; critical essays, such as the famous 
series on Paradise Lost; reflective essays, such as the Medi- 
tations in Westminster Abbey; or stories and allegories, such 
as Hilpa and Shalum or the Golden Scales. 

We are to note also that both the Tatler and the Specta- 
tor were directly and consciously addressed to the growing 
Addison and public of readers, or, as Addison says, to the 
the reading " great audience " that " I have raised to myself." 
pu c ' Especial care was taken to reach and interest 

women, whose claims were then generally ignored. " There 
are non^," says Addison, "to whom this paper will be more 
useful than to the female world;" 1 and his words tell us 

1 Spectator, No. 10. See c ''re paper. 



ADDISON. 355 

that the spirit of Restoration England, where women were 
flattered and despised, is passing away. Addison does not 
flatter; he shows the fine women of fashion how vain and 
ignorant they are, how empty and frivolous are the lives 
they lead; but we feel that his severity is inspired by his 
belief that woman was made for higher things. 

With the production of his ponderous tragedy of Cato j in 
1713, Addison reached the summit of success in his fortu- 
nate career. By singular good luck, Cato, which 
lacked almost every quality of a good acting 
play, achieved an extraordinary success. It was brought 
out in a moment of feverish political excitement, and both 
the Whigs and the Tories claimed to see in it a confirma- 
tion of the justness of their respective views. We find it 
intolerably dull and sententious, and it is forgotten except 
for a few well-known lines ; nevertheless, in the eyes of his 
contemporaries it was the crowning triumph of its author, 
and the great Frenchman, Voltaire, pronounced it a master- 
piece. 

Addison's last years show us what a great social and po- 
litical eminence a man of high character, sound judgment, 
and literary ability could then attain. In 1716 

Last years. J J 

he married the Dowager Countess of Warwick, 
and in the year following he became Secretary of State. 
Failing health soon compelled him to resign this great 
office, and he died in 1719. 

Almost universally popular and respected in his lifetime, 
Addison remains one of the most honoured of English writers. 
His poetry, except a few of his hymns, was com- 
and r works. monplace and uninspired; his once famous trag- 
edy is little short of a failure; but his best essays 
have a humanity, a grace, and a sympathetic humour 
which neither time nor the change in literary fashions 
has been able to impair. And Addison is still honoured, 
not only for what he wrote, but also for what he was. He 



356 THE AGE OE POPE. 

lived in the midst of literary warfare, of contending fac- 
tions in politics, and bitter animosities in religion; he had 
his enemies — what man in such a time has not? — yet he 
lived out his prosperous, well-ordered life undisturbed by 
these things, a man of stainless honour, wise, benevolent, 
dignified, and serene. He was a shy man, silent, and, it is 
said, even stiff and awkward among strangers; but when 
he was at ease with his friends he is reported to have been 
'"the best company in the world.'' * Even to this da}' we 
feel this touch of chill in his dignified reserve, and we should 
not dare to claim him for our friend as we did Steele. We 
are attracted to Steele by his frank humility; we have an 
uncomfortable impression that Addison knew how much 
better he was than the rest of us. His hero, Cato, is the 
essence of self-complacent superiority; he thus instructs 
one of his followers: 

''Dost thou love watchings, abstinence and toil, labo- 
rious virtues all? learn them from Cato." 2 

Addison himself taught the world after a very different 
fashion; he would never have said this, but we are inclined 
to suspect that he also felt the comforting assurance of 
superior virtue. But, if Addison calls forth our respect 
rather than our affection, we must not fail to do full jus- 
tice to the nobility of his character and his life. When 
we reflect upon the great work that he performed for Eng- 
lish society, and the way in which he accomplished it, even 
the slightest disparagement of him seems ungrateful and 
unimportant; we remember him only as Macaulay truly 
described him, as "the unsullied statesman; the accom- 
plished scholar: the great satirist who alone knew how to 
use ridicule without abusing it; who, without inflicting a 
wound effected a great social reform, and who reconciled 
wit and virtue after a long and painful separation, during 

1 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 
1 Caic, Act ii. Sc. 4. * 



THE NOVEL. 357 

which wit had been led away by profligacy, and virtue by 
fanaticism." * 

THE HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

We can understand why it was that this unideal and 
unromantic epoch, with its growth of prose, its prevail- 
ing common sense, its firm grasp of the things which can 
be seen and handled, should have brought one especial 
kind of fiction to a higher development than it had yet 
known in England. The hard, practical intelligence of 
the time, w T eak in high emotions and in its sense of the 
mystical and the unseen, was correspondingly strong in 
the power of closely observing and faithfully reproducing 
the passing aspects of every-day life. Such conditions 
favoured the rise of the novel of domestic life and manners, 
which, in the hands of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, 
became virtually a new literary form. Yet the novel, 
while one of the most original and important contributions 
which the eighteenth century made to literature, was not 
a wholly new creation, but rather a new form given to a 
very ancient kind of writing by the changed temper of 
the times. In part, at least, it grew out of the earlier 
romances and short stories, just as the Elizabethan drama 
grew out of, yet differed from, the earlier dramatic forms. 
To make this clear, it is necessary to speak briefly of the 
history of English fiction before this time. 

The love of a story is so wide-spread and deep-seated 
that it seems natural to the race. We delight in stories 
before we are out of the nursery, and the world 
the^vel nas l° ve d to tell and hear them since its child- 
hood. Many of the noblest stories of early times 
were in verse, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the latter 
perhaps the most fascinating story of antiquity. To this 

1 Macaulay, Essay on the Life and Writings of Addison. The only 
exception that could be justly taken to this splendid and famous 
tribute is that Steele is given no credit for his share in this reform. 



358 THE AGE OF POPE. 

class our own Beowulf belongs. We may thus think of the 
epic poem as a kind of exalted precursor of the novel, sup- 
plying, after its own fashion, the same deep, human need. 
Besides the great stories in verse, there was, of course, an 
immense mass of myth and folklore, and some of these 
world-stories have never ceased to delight children down 
to our day. 

After the classic epics, we reach another stage of devel- 
opment in the mediaeval romance. This, in. its original 
meaning, was a narrative poem in one of the Romance 
dialects, as Old French or Provencal. These romances 
may be thought of as a mediaeval form of the epic; they 
embodied the chivalric ideas peculiar to the time, and 
marked an important step towards the creation of the 
novel. 

We have seen how these romances came into England 
with the Norman Conquest, passing from French to 
English paraphrases in the metrical romances 
h^EnSand. 6 °f ^he thirteenth century. Another step to- 
wards the novel is taken when some of these 
stories are retold in English prose : Malory's Morte d' Arthur 
may be taken as an example of this important change in 
form. The revival of learning infused new life into English 
story-telling, as it did into almost every other form of 
literary art, and in the sixteenth century the romances in- 
creased in number and importance. Besides the romances 
produced by English writers, great numbers of Italian, 
French, and Spanish stories were translated or paraphrased, 
and, put forth separately or in collections, became widely 
popular. Paynter's Palace of Pleasure (vol. i. 1566), a 
good example of such collections, contained stories from 
Boccaccio, "and other italian and french authours. " From 
Spain came the famous romance, Amadis de Gaul. Through 
such channels a flood of foreign romance poured in upon 
the English. Romantic stories piled on the London 



THE NOVEL. 359 

bookstalls, and eagerly bought and read, furnished plots 
and suggestions to the English dramatist and story-teller. 
Shakespeare used them, and Sidney modelled his Arcadia 
in part upon the Amadis de Gaul. 

The general tone of the Elizabethan stories was poetic 
and fanciful; many of them were pastoral or chivalric 
in character. It is true that both Greene and Nash wrote 
stories, "the main object of which was to paint, to the life, 
ordinary men ana characters," but most of the famous 
stories of the time were as remote from the prosaic realities 
of existence as a Watteau shepherdess. Thus More's 
Utopia, if we choose to consider it a romance at all, intro- 
duces us to a world that exists only as an ideal; John 
Lyly's Euphues is couched in a highly-wrought and 
affected style, elaborately artificial, although close enough 
to the strange humour of the time to become a passing 
affectation of the court. Lodge's Rosalind — the original 
of Shakespeare's As You Like It — is a pastoral idyl, 
where shepherds and shepherdesses utter high-flown 
sentiments, and sing madrigals and "pleasant eclogues" 
under the boughs of Arden Forest. The very title of Sid- 
ney's Arcadia takes us into this land of pastoral romance, 
where the shepherd boy pipes " as though he should never 
be old. " * Such works aimed less at the lifelike delineation 
of character, than at the creation of a world transfigured 
by the light of a chivalric or idyllic atmosphere. Yet 
such stories, however alien to the life of our day, were far 
less removed from that of the Elizabethan. Then the 
spirit of chivalry lived, and the imagination was liberated 
and quickened by the swift advance, the stir and strange- 
ness, of the time. The Elizabethan romance is the true 
child of the age which produced such works as Faustus, 
As You Like It, The Tempest, The Faithful Shepherdess, 
and the Faerie Queen e, 

1 Arcadia, Bk. L 



360 THE AGE OF POPE. 

During the seventeenth century the romance, instead 
of advancing toward truthfulness and simplicity, became 

Seventeenth more ^ u ^ °^ ^ se anc * extravagant heroics, 
century and farther removed from actual life. French 
romances. romances were immensely popular, in the 
original, or in the translation; and in spite of a few at- 
tempts to stem the current, the general tone was pompous 
and inflated. Jusserand says of this period : " The hundred 
years which follow Shakespeare's death are, therefore, 
taken altogether, a period of little invention and progress 
for romance literature. The only new development it 
takes consists in the exaggeration of the heroic element, 
of which there was already enough in many an Elizabethan 
novel; it consists, in fact, in the magnifying of a defect." * 
For the time, farther progress in the old lines of romance- 
writing became impossible. After the Restoration the 
rhapsodies of a pseudo-chivalry became more and more 
out of keeping with the open-eyed, practical, and com- 
paratively modern temper of the time. Prose was dis- 
carding its ponderous, or elaborately affected manner, 
and becoming plainer, more serviceable, and more direct. 
Under these conditions a new form of story-telling, dis- 
tinguished by its skill in the delineation of character, its 
simple style, free from factitious embellishments, its sharp 
and clear-cut presentations of ordinary life, gradually 
took form. It is true that this kind of fiction had been 
partially anticipated at a much earlier period. As far back 
as the Elizabethan days, Thomas Nash, the forerunner of 
the realistic novelists, had introduced his readers to well- 
denned types of contemporary character. In Pierce 
Penniless, for instance, he describes, among many other 
characteristic personages, "the prodigal young master" 
who falls in a quarrelling humour with Fortune, because 
she made him not "King of the Indies;" who swears that 

1 The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, p. 412. 



THE NOVEL. 361 

"neither father nor brother will keep him under;" that 
he will go to sea, "and teare the gold out of Spanish 
throats, but he will have it, by'r ladye. " 1 

Ben Jonson introduced similar character-sketches into 
his Cynthia's Revels (1600), and in the seventeenth cen- 
tury several books were published, consisting entirely of 
short character-studies, unconnected by any framework 
of narrative. Among these, one of the best known is the 
Characters of Sir Thomas Overbury (pub. 1614), a court- 
ier and minor poet. Other " character-writers " of the time 
were Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, pub. 
1608) and John Earle (Microcosmography, 1628). Thus, 
while in the tedious and drawn-out stories of the romance- 
writer, the depiction of character was commonly neglected, 
a form of prose became popular, in which character was 
the sole interest. But these character-writers portrayed 
a type rather than an individual; and the general charac- 
teristics of this type, or class, were exhibited merely by 
the dry enumeration of peculiarities of life, dress, or 
manners. 

A further step was taken toward the modern novel of 
character when Steele and Addison, in their periodical 
essays, depicted a type of contemporary life, 
th^noveL*" 1 n °t by a formal enumeration of qualities, but 
through living men and women shown acting 
and conversing in the midst of their daily surroundings. 
In the De Coverley papers, with their fresh and faithful 
pictures of English town and country life, with their grasp 
of character, their amusing or pathetic scenes and inci- 
dents, we have all the elements but one of the modern 
novel. Here, indeed, is a novel held in solution. Had 
these elements been united by a regularly constructed plot, 
bringing an added interest, and binding scene to scene, and 
character to character, by a closer and more inevitable 
1 Works of Thomas Nash, Grosart's ed. ii. p. 29. 



362 THE AGE OF POPE, 

sequence, we should have had a story to set side by side 
with the Vicar of Wakefield. Here and there, in the De 
Coverley essays, are persons and situations almost identical 
with those which were soon to find a place in the master- 
pieces of English fiction. The ingenuous comments of Sir 
Roger at the play may be compared with the provincial 
criticisms of Partridge on Mr. Garrick's Hamlet in Field- 
ing's Tom Jones. Sir Roger himself may be appropriately 
placed beside the contrast-study of Squire Western in the 
same novel. If, on the other hand, we compare these 
charming sketches of Addison's with what has preceded 
them, we realise that the "Country Gentleman" in Over- 
bury's Characters is a mere aggregation of qualities, while 
Sir Roger, representing the same class, is no type or ab- 
straction, but a veritable man, whose little oddities we 
know and understand — a friend we love and mourn for. 
Having advanced thus far, we have reached the very 
boundaries of a new development in the story-writer's art. 
But into this region Addison and Steele did not enter. The 
next great step 'toward the modern novel was left for a man 
whom Addison scorned, one of the most brilliant, indomi- 
table, and enigmatical of English writers, Daniel Defoe. 



DEFOE. 363 

DANIEL DEFOE. 
(16597-1731.) 

"De Foe is our only famous politician and man of letters, who 
represented, in its inflexible constancy, sturdy resolution, unwearied 
perseverance, and obstinate contempt of danger and tyranny, the 
great middle-class English character." — John Foster. 

"One of these authors (the fellow who was pilloried, I have forgot 
his name) is indeed so grave, sententious, dogmatical a rogue, that 
there is no enduring him." — Jonathan Swift. ■ 

"He that will help you, must be hated and neglected by you, must 
be mobbed and plundered for you, must starve and hang for you, 
and must yet help you. And thus do I." — Daniel Defoe. 

Defoe's life is charged with the spirit of adventure. He 
was "ever a fighter;" and, although he was the most pro- 
lific English writer of his time, he was no scholarly recluse, 
His busy and ^ut ^ rs ^ an< ^ ^ as ^ a P rac tical man, who took an 
stirring active and not unimportant part in the daily 

career. WO rk of the world. The spirited stories of 

life and adventure with which, towards the close of his 
career, he captivated his readers, were the work of one 
whose own experience was won outside the walls of a 
library or a university, one who had known riches and 
poverty, success and failure; one who had stood in the 
pillory, and had been two years in prison; who had 
owned a splendid mansion and kept his pleasure-boat 
and his coach; a man who had been at one time the 
trusted adviser of a grateful King, and at another an 
object of hatred, abuse, and contempt. He was one who 
could write of himself: 

" No man has tasted differing fortunes more, 
And thirteen times I have been rich and poor r ; " — 



one who could say: "In the school of affliction I have 



864 THE AGE OF POPE. 

learned more philosophy than at the academy, and more 
divinity than from the pulpit, — I have seen the rough side 
of the world as well as the smooth." 

Daniel Foe. or Defoe as he afterwards called himself, 
was born in or about 1659. in the parish of St. Giles. Criu- 
_ . rlemte. London. Socially, his position clif- 

Earlj rears. \ - . . 

in literature. Bv inheritance and conviction he was a 
Dissenter in rehiion; bv occupation he belonged to the 
trading, or merchant class. His father. James Foe. was 
a butcher, ami appears to have been well-to-do and re- 
spected: but we must remember that England had not vet 



on 


e or 


De: 


:oe s 


ha 


.ted. 


of 


the 


Dc 


uoe. 



tastes lay in other directions. vThen he was about eigh- 
years. He took a keen interest in politii-s and in social 



or hi cm se 


":;. t-l C* 


certain or. 


ier. plain, visj 



is. sensibk. an: i i-onvircing. On 
the accession of William and IMarv v 16S9b he became a 



DEFOE. 365 

strenuous supporter of the government. A few years later 
he failed in business, perhaps because his energies had been 
so largely given to literary and political pursuits; and after 
a time he became connected with a brick and tile manufac- 
tory at Tilbury, a little town on the Thames below London. 
This has been called " the most prosperous and honourable 
period of his life." He was honestly in accord with the 
Government, and an enthusiastic admirer of the King, to 
whom he had become personally known. He did the King 
good service by a pamphlet in defence of a standing 
The True- army (1697), and by some vigorous verses, The 
born English- True-born Englishman, which greatly increased 
maj1 ' his reputation. 1 The occasion of this vigorous 

production was the growing unpopularity of the King, and 
the violent attacks which had been made upon him and 
his Dutch followers because of their foreign birth. Defoe 
confronted the storm of popular feeling with a splendid 
audacity, and belaboured the whole English nation with 
no light hand. He pointed out that those who proudly 
claimed superiority on the ground that they were "true- 
born" Englishmen were themselves of mixed descent. 
There was no "true-born" Englishman, for the whole 
English nation, as then constituted, was the result of a 
mixture of various foreign elements. 

"For Englishmen to boast of generation 
Cancels their knowledge and lampoons the nation; 
A true-born Englishman's a contradiction, 
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction." 

Defoe's brief interval of prosperity was suddenly brought 
to an end by the King's death in 1702. Under the new 
sovereign, the High-Church party was uppermost; there 
was much violent talk against the Dissenters, and their 

1 According to Defoe's estimate, eighty thousand copies of this 
poem were sold in the streets. 



366 THE AGE OF POPE. 

position in the state became one of the questions of the 
hour. Defoe's contribution to the matter was an anony- 
The Shortest mous pamphlet, The Shortest Way with Dissen- 
Way with ters (1702), in which, instead of arguing against 
issenters. intolerance, he affected to take the side of his 
opponents, and tried, by stating their position in the ex- 
tremest and most brutal fashion, to arouse a feeling against 
them. The result was almost farcical, for Defoe had as- 
sumed the tone of the extremists so cleverly that both sides 
took the tract literally. The Dissenters were furious, and 
some Churchmen delighted; but, when the real nature of 
the pamphlet became apparent, both sides, angry at being 
deceived, turned on Defoe. He had pleased nobody, and, 
as he says, the whole "'world flew at him like a dog with a 
broom at his tail." He was condemned by the authorities 
to stand in the pillory at Temple Bar, and imprisoned for 
nearly two years in Xewgate. But misfortune and im- 
prisonment were powerless to tame his indomitable spirit or 
check his restless energy. He kept up the fight within the 
walls of his prison, writing controversial pamphlets, and 

starting a new periodical, his famous Review. If 
Defoe's we neec { ec [ an y p roo f f that vigour, courage, 

and versatility for which Defoe is distinguished, 
any demonstration of his almost unequalled readiness and 
fluency as a writer, we could find it in the pages of this 
periodical alone. In his Review, Defoe aimed to set forth 
and discuss the current news not of England only but of 
a great part of Europe. To compare the Review with a 
modern newspaper would be plainly unfair. T\ Tien we 
reflect that Defoe not only wrote his paper himself, but- 
prepared it without those aids and appliances which modern 
journalism finds indispensable, we must pronounce it a 
most extraordinary performance. For over nine years (Feb- 
ruary, 1704, to June, 1713) Defoe actually carried on this 
vast undertaking single-handed ; and, enormous as was the 



DEFOE. 367 

labour it involved, the Review was but an incident in his 
life of incessant literary production. 1 

After Defoe was released from prison in 1704, his course 
became less open and straightforward. He was employed 
Secret agent on sundry secret missions by the government, 
for the sometimes, he tells us, " running as much risk 

nmen * as a grenadier on a counterscarp." The depen- 
dence of the author upon the politician, which has been 
already referred to, had its temptations and its drawbacks 
as well as its advantages. It was a time of political un- 
certainty and of rapid change. Now the Whigs were in 
power, now the Tories; and the struggling author whose 
very livelihood was largely dependent upon the favour of 
the party in power had strong, if selfish, reasons for trans- 
ferring his services to the winning side. Defoe had shown 
that he could be bold in the defence of an unpopular cause ; 
but he was a master of the art of deception, and his char- 
acter seems to have been a singular mixture of courage and 
duplicity. When the Whigs were in control, he served the 
Whigs, and when the Tories took their place, the Tories; 
and in doing this he stooped in one instance to a deception 
which it is certainly hard to defend. Yet it would be a 
great mistake to think of him as habitually willing to sac- 
rifice his principles to his personal advantage ; nothing could 
be farther from the truth. Addison called him a "false, 
shuffling, prevaricating rascal ;" but, under all his tricks 
and disguises, there was a basis of conscience and of stub- 
born integrity. His position was often equivocal, his ac- 
tions ambiguous; but on the whole he worked consistently 
for the promotion of civil and religious liberty, the cause in 
which he believed; he changed his party, but he remained 

1 " This [the Review] was his largest, if not his most important, work, 
embracing in over five thousand pages essays on almost every branch 
of human knowledge; during the same nine years he published eighty 
distinct works, with 4,727 pages." Chambers's Cyclopedia of English 
Literature (new edition), vol. ii. p. 150. 



368 THE AGE OF POPE. 

essentially loyal to his principles; and, while he did not 
scruple to employ falsehood, he used it in the service of 
what he honestly believed to be the truth. One can sail 
under false colour's in order to deceive the enemy without 
being a traitor to one's country, and it is probable that 
Defoe looked upon double dealing as a legitimate part of 
the game of politics. 

Such was the general character of the first sixty years of 
Defoe's life, years of change, struggle, and almost incredible 
toil. Up to this time he had made no great and perma- 
nent contribution to his country's literature. He had 
written much, and he had profoundly influenced the men 
of his own time; but a great part of his writings had been 
devoted to questions of the hour, and intended only to 
serve some present need. All his toil seemed to have 
brought him but little. Many regarded him with suspi- 
cion or contempt; he was a hanger-on of politicians, ex- 
cluded from the select coterie of the great writers, and a 
mark for the shafts of Addison and Swift ; yet, at sixty, this 
journalist and political agent of questionable character pub- 
lished J£o&mso?i Crusoe (1719), a story which prom- 

Cras™ SOn ises t0 deli & nt tne world so lon S as tne s P irit of 
manly adventure and the love of the marvellous 

survive in the heart of man. It may seem strange to us 

that such a man should be able to turn aside at sixty from 

the tangles and turmoils of political disputes, and, by sheer 

force of imagination, to put himself in the place of a poor 

sailor, cast away on a solitary island in the Caribbean Sea ; 

but, in reality, some of Defoe's past work had, all unknown 

to him, been a preparation for his great task. Even in his 

Shortest Way with Dissenters, he had shown his ability to 

assume, for the time, another man's point of view; and in 

his work as a purveyor of news he had cultivated that power 

which he naturally possessed in so large a measure, — the 

power of making fiction look like truth. He had the in- 



DEFOE. 369 

stinct of the journalist rather than the spirit of the old- 
time scholar; the quick perception of what was likely to 
interest and amuse his readers, and an adroitness which 
enabled him to turn any passing sensation to good account. 
He was expert in making a "good story," as a modern 
newspaper reporter would call it, out of an especially de- 
structive storm, an earthquake, or the dying confession of 
a famous criminal; and in these stories truth and invention 
were sometimes so cunningly mingled that they became 
inseparable. Now, Robinson Crusoe is but a reporter's 
"story'' in a more expanded and a more purely imagina- 
tive form. It has a basis of fact, for it was founded on the 
adventures of Alexander Selkirk, an English sailor, who, 
in 1704, was abandoned by his companions on the island 
of Juan Fernandez. After about four years of solitary 
exile, Selkirk was rescued, and on his return to England 
became an object of public interest. Steele wrote of his 
singular adventures in The Englishman) and Defoe — who 
is said to have visited him at Bristol — found in them the 
suggestion for a narrative which has made the imaginary 
Crusoe seem real and substantial, while Selkirk, the actual 
man, is but little more than a name. But while we can in 
part explain how it came to be written, the production of 
such a book as Robinson Crusoe remains one of the marvels 
of literature. Out of the fret and partisanship of an arti- 
ficial time, when Pope and the rest are treating of the fash- 
ions and follies of the town, there comes suddenly the 
story of a far-away world ; the story of a man in an almost 
primitive relation to nature, shut away from kings, or 
party squabbles, or political institutions, and set face to 
face with the first vital problem of the race, the problem 
of wresting food and clothing and shelter from the earth 
and the sea by the ingenuity of his mind and the labour of 
his hands. The success of Robinson Crusoe diverted De- 
foe's energies into a new channel, and he wrote a number 



370 THE AGE OF POPE. 

of other stories which make his later years the most brilliant 
literary period of his life. Among these "secondary nov- 
els/' as Lamb called them, The Memories of a 
novels^ 17 Cavalier, The Life of Captain Singleton, Moll 
Flanders, and The History of Colonel Jack, are 
perhaps the best known. As a whole, none of these stories 
is equal to their great forerunner; yet they are full of 
marvellous bits of descriptive writing, and contain single 
scenes of great dramatic and narrative power. With 
Robinson Crusoe, these stories laid the foundations of 
English realistic fiction. 

Among these works of Defoe's last years, The Journal of 
the Plague Year (1722) holds a place by itself. It is prob- 
The Journal a ^^ ^ ne mos ^ wonderful example of Defoe's 
of the power of mingling fact and invention, and of 

Plague Year. i m p ar ti n g | the whole the appearance of 
simple truth. It is a minute, and apparently exact and care- 
ful account of the Great Plague which desolated London in 
1665 ; and it professes to be the Journal of an eye-witness, 
a saddler, who remained in the city during the pestilence. 
It is not a story as we commonly understand the word, for 
it can hardly be said to have a plot ; it is, to all appearance, 
but the simple, ghastly record of death, and terror, and 
sorrow, set down by an ordinary citizen who has lived 
through the experiences he describes. There is no display 
of emotion; nothing but hard, awful fact. We do not think 
of it as a work of art ; it is nature, our daily commonplace 
life in its hours of tragic crisis, in those unexpected dra- 
matic situations which seem beyond the fancies of the 
romancer. We hardly realise at first that Defoe's imagina- 
tion has created this, and that to produce such a perfect 
illusion demands the finest and most finished art. Defoe 
lacked many qualities which other great masters of fiction 
possessed; but, when he is within his own province, as in 



DEFOE. 371 

this Journal of the Plague, he has been seldom approached 
and perhaps never surpassed. 

When he published Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was in easy 
circumstances; but towards the close of his life he became 

again involved in difficulties, and even his strong 
Closing anc j k rave S pi r it was at last shaken by repeated 

misfortunes. Beset by poverty and troubles, 
he writes the year before his death: "I am so near my 
journey's end, and am hastening to the place where the 
weary are at rest; be it that the passage is rough and 
the day stormy, by what way soever He please to bring 
me to the end of it, I desire to finish life with this temper of 
soul in all cases — Te Deum Laudamus." His magnificent 
vitality which had brought him through so much now at 
last broke, and he "died of a lethargy" in a London 
lodging-house in 1731. He was buried in a famous Non- 
conformist cemetery in Bunhill Fields, London ; here John 
Bunyan and Isaac Watts lie also, and his grave is now 
marked by a monument erected to the author of Robinson 
Crusoe by the children of many lands. 



b.- 



THE AGE OF POPE. 





JONATHAN SWIFT. 




.100 7-1745. 


"To Dr. Jono,rbo 


d Swift, rbe most agreeable companion, the truest 
-:«: genius :o ho= o^i." 

— A ;~~ 'v'< oebomrion ri ms i ". .- ; ;'■'■. Iz 


.r:r:fr lis iz.ro* e: 


i ioeusr -^i: — rrriei oni boireb :.'.'. orioiooi obi::;: 
obie orrogonce. v^ubrv. pride, on:i omb:u:n --ere 


msunr: :mrea. 


— H : ?„i : z Waz? ; iz. 



"By far the greatest man of that time, I think, was Jonathan 
Swift. . . . He saw himself in a world of confusion and falsehood; no 

:: see ir ruun his." — Thomas Cabi/tle 



"A cynic and a misanthrope in prinriple. bis philosophy si life m 

ignrule. 'rose, sord ioise. ond bis impious norrkerr extends even :: :be 
Defty." — Joex Chotetox Colizxs. 



'•When o .>•-.-,"■-- rprbmis: 
norore ': enures o soomirii r. 



the most living creed, a man of strong 

list.'''' — So?. Lzsorz Sozphzv. 



Jena:: 


lan Swi 


fa, the 1 


grea 


1; .lr -0 


- . T 


--- — 


— s 


Character 

ana early 


ugaire 


in Du" 


r ill 


years. 


1 7 ' _ C 


trait h. 


was 


ii/orc .•? f 


": U a 'MH 


nctive 


sair: 


: reseiias 
a::a : ur 


a saara 


-_i ..- ^ ~| 


Ste 


a nuiui 


r : .":. :I "^ 


17 a. aai 


j - a. ■ 


s-l j :'s : 


:: was 


not ii 


ir.se 


indeed. : 


a aaaiav 


ways 


- -•_-. 


::v far t: 


_o great 


ir a- art 




:a uaiiias: 


an: as :: 




aaaia 


„ ._... 


'•-;.; - ■ ' 


, — : . 


- - - 


ing and 


Liauper: 


/as te: 


na er 



Fi 



table, and most tragic 
istory of his century. 
Swift, like Steele and 
ish descent. But the 
in which he faced the world 
he loving-kindness and good- 
e and Goldsmith to travel 
lining lias and light hearts, 
. an exceptionally hard one; 
more than usually fortunate, 
troubles were due not to his 
If, to his angry resentment 
mind, and to a selfish, grasp- 
-aa;:a exacted a subservient 



SWIFT. 373 

homage to his great powers. He chafed at poverty, 
he rebelled against college discipline and neglected his 
studies; his dependence on what he considered the grudg- 
ing charity of his uncle galled him, and he hated his bene- 
factor. Forced to take refuge in England by the Irish 
disturbances which succeeded the Revolution of 1688, he 
became secretary to his mother's kinsman Sir William 
Temple, a retired statesman of literary tastes. Most men 
in Swift's circumstances would have considered this 
position a stroke of good fortune, as Temple showed an 
interest in his young kinsman's career by acts of sub- 
stantial kindness. But Swift saw a slight in every care- 
less word. His mind was fixed upon what was due to 
him, rather than on what he owed to others, and (as he 
said defiantly in later life) he would not "be treated as a 
schoolboy." A speck which a healthy man would not 
notice will inflame a raw wound. A man of Swift's un- 
happy nature, placed in a position of dependence, sees 
occasions for offence in trifles, and broods bitterly over 
imaginary wrongs. Swift had, indeed, a most base and 
contemptible kind of pride. Smarting under a sense of 
obligation, he did not reject a kindness, but, to soothe his 
pride, he accepted it with ingratitude. He availed him- 
self of Temple's good offices and repaid them with petu- 
lance and suspicion. 

Young, brilliant, ambitious, and inordinately fond of 
power, Swift's natural bent was towards a political 

career; but circumstances, if not inclination, led 
Church the mm to ^ urn to ^ e Church, and he was ordained 

in 1694. The Church was one of the great 
avenues to advancement, but Swift's choice of a profes- 
sion seems to have been a miserable error. It is true that 
he performed his clerical duties with scrupulous fidelity; 
he held frequent services; he identified himself with the 
Church of England as a political institution, fought for 



374 THE AGE OF POPE. 

her privileges, and believed in her as a promoter of sound 
morals. He gave freely out of his little to the poor, and 
did many an unostentatious act of kindness; but Ms 
nature was earthly and essentially unspiritual, his ruling 
passion was for worldly power, and as he grew older he 
came more and more to hate and despise his fellow-men. 
Swift was nearly thirty before he showed the world 
the strength that was in him. During his stay at Sir 
William Temple's, he had tried his hand at poetry and 
failed miserably; his success was to be won in other fields. 
He had written and burned much when, between 1696 
and 1698, he wrote two prose works which suddenly 
revealed to the full the vigour, the ingenuity, the ease, and 
the robustness of the great satirist. These works, which 
were not published until 1704, were The Tale of a Tub and 
The Battle of the Books. In old times a ram- 

m. Tola 

of a Tub bling or fictitious story was sometimes called " a 
tale of a tub." Swift adopts this old expres- 
sion for his title, explaining that as seamen sometimes throw 
an empty tub' to a whale to divert his attack from the ship, 
so he throws out this idle story — this "tale of a tub" — ■ 
to divert the attention of the wits, or sceptics, from their 
attack upon the ship of state. The book is a satire upon 
the corruptions and abuses which have crept into Christian- 
ity, and upon the differences and disputes which divide 
Christendom. Its avowed purpose was to show the 
superiority of the Church of England, but we feel that the 
satire has a wider application. These petty religious 
squabbles (so Swift seems to imply) are but one of the 
manifestations of the pettiness and inherent depravity 
of man. At the heart of the book is the truly awful belief 
that the very springs of life are tainted at their source, 
that even those feelings which we are accustomed to regard 
as the glory of man are rooted in selfishness and corruption. 
It is better not to know the truth. Swift declares with 



SWIFT, 375 

bitter irony; the only happiness is in being deceived, so 
shall you be "a fool among knaves." Shakespeare, with 
his deeper and wider vision, could write that there was " a 
soul of goodness in things evil." Swift in his malevo- 
lence would reverse this saying, and thus take away our 
hope and our reverence and destroy for us the worth and 
dignity of human life. The Tale of a Tub is a great satire, 
one of the greatest utterances of an unspiritual and un- 
believing time; it has marvellous wit, force, and ingenuity; 
but with all its extraordinary merits, it is the work of a 
great intellect rather than of a good man. 

In The Battle of the Books, Swift took his share in a 

current controversy on the comparative merits of the 

literature of the classic and modern times. It 

e a " eo tells of a contest between the ancient and the 
modern books in the King's Library, and is a 
clever burlesque in prose of the Homeric or epic style. 
The Battle of the Books sneers at the shams of pedantry; 
The Tale of a Tub at shams in religion; Pope's Rape of 
the Lock at the shams of fashion. 

Shortly after the death of Sir William Temple in 1699, 
Swift was given a parish at Laracor, 1 a small village about 
twenty miles from Dublin. His income was 
small, his congregation often but "half a score," 
his church "dilapidated," and his parsonage miserably 
out of repair. It was indeed a dreary and contracted 
sphere for an ambitious man of genius; and Swift was not 
content to settle down at thirty into the humble routine 
of an obscure country parish. He came often to London, 
and joined in the political and literary life of the capital. 
Taken into favour by the Tory leaders, Harley and Boling- 
broke, who came into power in 1710, he gained a con- 
sideration and influence which show both his ability and 

1 Two other small livings were associated with Laracor, yielding 
him in all about two hundred pounds a year. 



376 THE AGE OF POPE. 

his imperious power over men. Dr. Johnson said of him 
that "he predominated over his companions with very 
high ascendency, and probably would bear none over 
whom he could not predominate. " 1 His very looks 
struck terror; he loved to intimidate weakness and show 
his power even over the great. "I used them like dogs/' 
he writes, "because I expect they will use me so." 2 

But these years of his triumphs, when he carried his 
head high among the highest, are also the years in which 
the gentler and more playful side of his com- 
steUa & ° P^ ex na ^ ure is revealed in his Journal to Stella. 
This is made up of letters in the form of a journal, 
written to his former pupil Hester Johnson, whom he had 
met as a child in the household of Sir William Temple. He 
called her " Stella, " the " star " of his darkness. Scribbled 
hastily, with no thought beyond the desire to give pleasure 
to "Stella" and the little group of friends in Ireland, these 
letters move us, as no other writings of Swift do, to tender- 
ness, awe, and pity. They warn us that even Swift had 
"two soul-sides, " 3 and remind us that when we cannot 
understand we should be cautious how we judge. 

In 1713 Swift was rewarded by the deanery of St. 
Patrick's, Dublin; but. in the year following, the downfall 
of the Tory Government was followed by the 
revwsTs 1 . deatLs of Parley and the Queen. Swift's poli- 
tical fortunes went down in the general wreck; 
nothing remained to him but what seemed a life of weary 
exile in his deanery, and the bitterness of disappointment 
and disgust. "What a world is this," Bolingbroke wrote 
to him after the crash came, "and how does fortune banter 
us!" 

The effect of this sudden plunge into comparative 
obscurity, from a place of power in the political and 

1 Johnson's Lives of the Poets, " Swift." 
* Letter to Stella. 8 7, Browning's "One Word More." 



SWIFT. 377 

literary circles of the capital, can be readily understood. 
Swift wrote with morbid sadness that there his life was 
"no soul's concern," and that those about him would fol- 
low his hearse "without a tear. " * "The best and greatest 
part of my life," he declared, "I spent in England; there 
I made my friendships and there I left my desires. " 2 It 
was during those years of loneliness, bitter with brooding 
over disappointed hopes, that Swift wrote Gulliver's 
t Travels (published 1726). Swift says in one of 
Travels. his letters that its chief purpose was to show his 
hatred of that detestable animal, man; certainly 
he poured into it that sceva indignatio, that fierce wrath at 
life and his brother-men, which had tormented him in his 
hours of darkness. Aside from its deeper purpose, Gulliver's 
Travels is first of all a fascinating story; wonderful in the 
originality and ingenuity of its conceptions, and in the 
surprising naturalness which the skill of a great artist has 
given to the whole. The most pitiless of satires, it is also, 
with some omissions, " the most delightful children's book 
ever written." Unbelievable as it is, we are almost 
persuaded that it must be true. Simply as a story, it 
marks another great advance in the progress of eighteenth- 
century fiction; and we feel that these strange adventures 
of Lemuel Gulliver, ship's surgeon, have that air of careful 
veracity which places them with the adventures of Robin- 
son Crusoe, mariner of York. But while, in Defoe's 
romance, we hear the warnings of the preacher, the prac- 
tical morality of the middle-class Englishman of the day, 
in Swift's we hear the fallen politician railing at the 
pettiness of statecraft and at all the vaunted glory of man. 
"From what you tell me of your country," says the 
gigantic King of Brobdingnag to Gulliver, " I cannot but 

1 Verses "In Sickness" (1714), Sheridan's ed. of Swift, vol. vii. 
p. 142. 

2 Swift's Letters and Journals, edited by Stanley Lane Poole, p. 191. 



378 THE AGE OF POPE. 

conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most per- 
nicious race of little odious vermin, that nature ever 
suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. " * This 
is the motive passion of the book. It is not merely a 
satire on the passing phases of English politics, or par- 
ticular systems, or persons; beyond all this it is a satire 
on our race, on "that hated and detestable animal called 
man. " As the book advances, this rage against mankind 
grows more rabid and more malignant. Man's knowledge 
is foolishness; his reason, which to Shakespeare seemed 
the attribute of a god, is held up to contempt ; his instincts 
are proclaimed brutish and vile. We find here the hope- 
less, faithless doctrine of The Tale of a Tub reiterated and 
reaffirmed after thirty years. 

Swift's life went down in loneliness and darkness. Esther 
Vanhomrigh, whose love he had slighted, died; Hester 
Johnson, who had called out the best he had to 
death! 7 an S^ ve °f l° ve an< ^ tenderness, died also, and one 
of the strangest and most tragic of the world's 
love stories was at an end. Once he had written vin- 
dictively that he was doomed to die in obscurity "like a 
poisoned rat in a hole;" now his life drifted on help- 
lessly toward a pitiable and awful close. In loneliness, 
in failing health, and in what inward and unspeakable 
anguish we can only conjecture, the shadows of insanity 
closed in on Swift's clear and splendid intellect; and he 
sank into a mindless apathy from which he seldom roused. 
He died in 1745. "An immense genius," writes Thacke- 
ray; "an awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he 
seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an 
empire falling. " 2 

Some may ask why this man, the clearest intellect of his 
age, saw all the world awry. Why could he find no gleams 

1 Gulliver's Travels: "A Voyage to Brobdingnag," chap. vi. 
* English Humourists, "Swift." 



SWIFT. 379 

of Divinity in man? Why did he put darkness for light, 
and pass over that which was beautiful and 
M^time* n °ble, and fasten on the repulsive and the vile? 
No one can fully answer such questions, but 
they are answered in part by the state of England in 
Swift's time. There was actually much in the world, as 
Swift knew it, to make a man of earnest and melancholy 
nature despair of his kind, much to provoke cynicism and 
contempt. Vice indeed was less open and defiant than it 
had been a generation or two earlier, and an awakening 
sense of decency and order was beginning to make itself 
felt; but the wild license of the Restoration had left behind 
it a cynical disbelief in virtue. A mocking spirit, the 
spirit of denial, infected the moral atmosphere. Men had 
sneered at enthusiasm; they had worshipped the reason 
and the intellect, and slighted and despised those feelings 
which are the true glory of man. They had obscured their 
higher nature, and they were then tempted to complain 
that there was no higher nature in man. The sins of the 
fathers were indeed visited on the men of Swift's genera- 
tion. Pope had his word of contempt for man; the easy- 
going Gay says lightly that "life is a jest;" * but to the 
man of deeper and stronger nature life was both a farce and 
a tragedy. Yet Swift, while he denounced his time, 
failed to rise above it. His ambition appears to have 
been as earthly, as material, and as selfish, as that of the 
men he satirises. He railed at the fools who contended 
for the world's trumpery prizes; but few pursued those 
prizes more eagerly, few were more bitterly disappointed 
than Swift when they slipped from his grasp. There is no 
reason to doubt his sincerity when he says of himself: 
" All my endeavours from a boy to distinguish myself were 

1 "Life is a jest, and all things show it; 
I thought so once, but now I know it." 
— Gay: My Own Epitaph. 



380 THE. AGE OF POPE. 

only for want of a great title and fortune, that I might be 
used like a lord." Swift then is himself an actor in the 
farce he satirises; he not only hates his time, but he belongs 
to it through his life as well as his works. He shares in its 
vulgarity of aim, he is the strongest expression of its mis- 
anthropy and its materialism, and he is the truly awful 
example of its errors. "We live," said the poet who did 
so much to restore this lost delight in man and Nature, 
" we live by admiration, hope, and love. " l Swift, carrying 
out to the uttermost the tendency of his age, is a man who 
tried to live by contempt, by hate, and by despair, and the 
soul of man cannot live by these things. 

Other Prose-Writers of the Early Eighteenth 
Century. 

Among the features of the early eighteenth-century lit- 
erature, we have mentioned the rise of a clear and effec- 
Abundance ^ ve P r ose-style, and an extension of the influence 
of prose- of prose as a literary form. We have studied this 
literature. p r0 se-literature through some of its great mas- 
ters, — Steele, Addison, Swift, Defoe, — but in order to form 
any true idea of its variety and importance, we must realise 
that these representative writers lived and worked among 
a host of others, philosophers, scientists, essayists, theolo- 
gians, pamphleteers. Nor is this great host a mere crowd 
of obscure or "minor" authors; it includes some of the most 
learned, conspicuous, and brilliant men of the time. We 
must content ourselves with the merest mention of some 
of these men; but we must remember that the searching 
and restless intellect of this age, showed itself in the num- 
ber of writers and in the sheer amount and range of their 
productions; and that much must be omitted in our brief 
enumeration of a few great names. Some of these men 

1 Wordsworth: The Excursion. Bk. iv. 



OTHER PROSE-WRITERS. 381 

indeed, won distinction outside of the strict limits of lit- 
erature; they were great scholars, or great philosophers 
rather than simply men of letters; a few are more remark- 
able for the intellectual stimulus they exerted on the men 
about them than for the permanent value of their own work, 
but each helped in his own fashion, to determine the tone 

and character of his time. Thus Dr. John Ar- 
Ariuthnot buthnot (1667-1735) is now remembered rather 

for his high character, his friendship, and his 
personal influence upon some of the greatest writers of his 
generation than for his own contributions to literature. He 
was a Scotch physician who settled in London towards the 
close of the seventeenth century and devoted himself to 
science, literature, and the practice of his profession. He 
became physician to Prince George of Denmark, and in 1705 
was made physician extraordinary to the Queen. He was on 
intimate terms with Pope, Swift, and other great writers; 
and, if we trust the opinion of his friends, was one of the 
kindest and most lovable as well as one of the ablest of 
men. Pope wrote of him with gratitude and affection, and 
addressed one of the best and most famous of his Epistles 
to him. Swift said of him : " He has more wit than we all 
have, and his humanity is equal to his wit." " If the world," 
he wrote to Pope, "had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I 
would burn my Travels." Dr. Johnson pronounced him 
"the first man" among the great writers of his age. "He 
was the most universal genius, being an excellent physician, 
a man of deep learning, and a man of much humour." Dr. 
Arbuthnot was singularly indifferent to his own literary 
reputation, but in the face of such testimony we cannot 
doubt that his mere personality was a literary force. He 
wrote several learned and scientific works ; but in literature 
he is remembered chiefly by two works of satiric humour, 
somewhat in the manner of Swift — the Memoirs of Martin 
Scriblerus, a travesty on pedantic learning; and The His- 



882 THE AGE OF POPE. 

tory of John Bull (1712), a satire directed against the Duke 
of Marlborough and the continuance of the war with France. 

Although his works are now but seldom read, Henry St. 
John, Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751), was one of the most 
brilliant and conspicuous figures in the literary, 
broke. ° nS ~ political, and social life of his age. At first sight 
he seems destined for distinction, endowed with 
all the gifts which lead men to greatness and power. He carne 
of an old and noble family; his means were ample; he had 
extraordinary personal beauty, great charm and elegance 
of manner; and he was one of the best talkers in London at 
a time when London was full of clever men. He had an 
almost unfailing memory, stored with the wisdom of the 
classic writers; a clear, vigorous intellect, quick and active, 
if not solid and profound. When not occupied with poli- 
tics or the pursuit of pleasure, he amused himself with lit- 
erature and philosophy; and his prose — unconstrained, 
spirited, and effective — has given him no mean place 
among the masters of English style. Besides all these ad- 
vantages, he was possessed of extraordinary eloquence ; and 
his splendid presence, his mastery of language, his charm 
of voice and manner, made him, by common consent, the 
greatest orator of his day. 

With all these varied talents, Bolingbroke longed for 
distinction, — distinction not in one direction but in all. He 
was distinguished among a corrupt, dissipated aristocracy 
by the wildness of his excesses; distinguished among states- 
men by the splendour of his abilities; distinguished among 
authors and philosophers by his liberal patronage and by 
his cultivated tastes. He is a great figure in literary as 
well as in political history, and we probably think of him 
more often as the friend of Pope than as the antagonist of 
Sir Robert Walpole. He was the honoured companion of 
the greatest wits. Swift was his political ally, and em- 
ployed his unrivalled powers of satire and abuse in Boling- 



BOLINGBROKE. 883 

broke's cause. If you would know how Pope admired him, 
read over again those famous lines at the close of the Essay 
on Man, in which the poet calls Bolingbroke his "guide, 
philosopher, and friend,' ' and addresses him as the "mas- 
ter" and inspirer alike of the poet and the song. 1 

The dramatic story of Bolingbroke's career must be read 
elsewhere. Almost at the height of success, and while he 

was still a young man, he lost almost at one 
higbroke 01 " str oke all that he had played for; and the most 

brilliant statesman of England was an exile and a 
fugitive. For thirty-six years he had been a spoiled child of 
fortune, fed with pleasures and power; he was to live on for 
thirty-seven years more, cut off from the triumphs in 
which he had delighted, an envious, discontented man, 
left to console himself with philosophy as best he could. 
Debarred from other avenues to distinction, he turned to 
authorship, the only road left open. Swift, whose political 
fortunes were wrecked with those of his leader, sneered at 
the pettiness and folly of human ambitions; Bolingbroke 
(whether to console himself, or to deceive others) affected a 
lofty superiority to ill-fortune. The disappointed place* 
hunter snarling at the fools who sought for preferment, the 
disappointed politician in France, declaiming on the advan- 
tages of seclusion and contemplation, what a theme was 
this for Swift's bitter mockery, if the great satirist could 

only have viewed it with an impartial mind. In 
upon exile 8 . n ^ s Reflections upon Exile (1716), Bolingbroke 

pictures himself as the philosopher, serene in the 
midst of adversity, and able to meditate upon its uses to 
the wise and virtuous. " Far from the hurry of the world, 
and an almost unconcerned spectator of what passes in it, 
having paid in a public life what you owed to the present 
age, pay in a private life what you owe to posterity. Write 

1 Bolingbroke furnished Pope with much of the philosophy of the 
Essay on Man, and Pope dedicated the work to him. 



384 THE AGE OF POPE. 

as you live, without passion; and build your reputation, 
as you build your happiness, on the foundations of truth." 

This is a dignified and lofty resolve, nobly uttered; but 
unhappily, when we compare it with the facts, it only sug- 
gests to us the fatal flaw in Bolingbroke's life and works. 
With all his showy talents, his character had no adequate 
"foundations of truth." He was the child of his age; 
resplendent in surface adornments, but wanting in a 
substantial basis of sound morals and honest conviction. 
Under these fine phrases there is this taint of insincerity, 
characteristic of the man. ''"'Few people,"' said Lord Her- 
vey, "ever believed him without being deceived, or trusted 
him without being betrayed." Discredited as a statesman 
by the men of his own generation, and neglected as an 
author by posterity, his great reputation has suffered 
because it rests so largely on a foundation of pretence; 
for one of the virtues which give permanence to literature 
is truth. 

Bolingbroke's Letters to Sir William Wyndham (1717), 
a defence of his political career, is usually regarded as his 
masterpiece in point of style. Among his 
' other works, the Idea of a Patriot King (1749) 
and the Letters on the Study of History (1752), are probably 
the best known. The best works of Bolingbroke, at least, 
should be studied, if only for their style; for he excels 
his contemporaries in courtly dignity and elevation, and 
at times in eloquence. It is the style of the orator, very 
different from the strong simplicity of Swift and Defoe, 
or from the grace and almost conversational ease of Addi- 
son; and in this Bolingbroke may be regarded as the 
forerunner of Burke and of Gibbon. 1 

Every one agrees that Bolingbroke represented his age, 

1 On this point consult Bolingbroke, by J. C. Collins, p. 14. Mr. 
Collins's position, however, seems to me somewhat extreme; for he 
claims that English prose "owes more to Bolingbroke than to any 
other single writer." 



BERKELEY. 385 

that many traits and tendencies then characteristic of 
English life and thought were united in his char- 
Berkeley, acter and apparent in his career. But we must 
remember that when we speak of the character 
or "spirit of an age" in general terms, classifying it as 
religious or sceptical, practical or romantic, we are simply 
attempting to indicate its most ordinary and apparent 
traits. All the men of an age are not made after the same 
pattern; there are always many exceptions to the "spirit 
of the age," — base men in noble times and high-minded 
dreamers in the midst of the most practical and sordid 
societies. Such a pure and lofty spirit was George 
Berkeley (1685-1753), one of the subtlest thinkers and 
noblest men that England has produced. Against the dark 
background of the time, his character shines with a clear, 
unwavering radiance. He remains devout among sceptics; 
reverent among scoffers; unworldly and unselfish, when 
every man seems bent upon snatching the prizes of life 
from his neighbour. As a thinker he squarely opposed the 
"spirit of the age." In the midst of a coarse materialism, 
when men held fast to "common sense" and distrusted 
anything which seemed spiritual or ideal, Berkeley put 
forth his philosophy of idealism, according to which we can 
only know that which we call matter or substance, as an 
idea in the mind. The true reality, therefore, was not 
matter, but thought or spirit. This theory seemed very 
visionary and absurd to the men of that substantial 
generation, and Dr. Arbuthnot and many others had their 
jokes at the philosopher's expense. But they were good- 
natured jokes; for Berkeley's unaffected goodness, his 
genuine learning and enthusiasm, made him a favourite 
even among the scoffers. Born in Ireland, when Berkeley 
came to London in 1713, after a long residence at Trinity 
College, Dublin, he was welcomed by the leading men of 
letters. Swift, his fellow-countryman, showed him much 



386 THE AGE OF POPE. 

kindness; Pope declared that he was possessed of "every 
virtue under heaven;" and Francis Atterbury, the well- 
known bishop and writer, said of him : " So much learning, 
so much knowledge, so much innocence and humility, I 
did not think had been the portion of any but angels, till 
I saw this gentleman." Berkeley's writings are chiefly 
devoted to the exposition of his philosophical system. 
His philosophic dialogues (Hylas and Philonous, and 
Alciphron) follow the manner of Plato or of Cicero, and 
have, in addition to their other merits, a decided literary 
charm. But most of us associate the name of Berkeley 
chiefly with those verses in which, almost despairing of 
England, — lost (as she seemed to him) to all that had 
made her glorious in the past, — he looked forward to a 
better age in the new world of the West. 

"The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime 
Barren of every glorious theme, 
In distant lands now waits a better time, 
Producing subjects worthy fame. 



In' happy climes, the seat of innocence, 
Where nature guides and virtue rules, 
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense 
The pedantry of courts and schools, — 
There shall be sung another Golden Age, 
The rise of Empire and of Arts, 
The Good and Great inspiring epic rage, 
The wisest heads and noblest hearts. 

Westward the course of Empire takes its way; 
The first four acts already past, 
A fifth shall close the drama with the day: — 
Time's noblest offspring is the last." 

But low as England had sunk, her state was not so hope- 
less as Berkeley feared. His very discontent was itself a 
good omen; even when he wrote, a subtle spirit of change 
was in the air, and before he died that great spiritual 
transformation which may be called the redemption of 
England had definitely begun. 



RICHARDSON. 887 

Richardson and Fielding. 

While in the hands of Defoe and Swift the novel had 
come to share in the realistic spirit of the time, it still 
remained distinctly the novel of adventure; its interest 
resting mainly, although not entirely, upon the presenta- 
tion of the more stirring and exceptional side of life. 
Both Defoe and Swift employed the autobiographical 
form, and in Defoe's work the supposed narrator was often 
beyond the pale of respectable society. 

Between 1740 and 1750, a new form of fiction came 
into existence, connected with, and yet distinct from, all 
The novel that na( ^ S one before ; this was the story of 
of domestic ordinary domestic life and manners. To the 
dramatist, indeed, this world of every day was 
not unknown, but in appropriating it to his use the 
novelist was virtually gaining a new world for his art. 
Like most great discoveries, the thing seems obvious 
enough when once it has been done ; yet Defoe had thought 
it necessary to drag his readers into obscure and unsavoury 
places, or to transport them to the ends of the earth, over- 
looking the artistic possibilities of a world which lay at 
his feet. In a century and a half this new form of fiction 
has grown to astonishing proportions, until it is possibly 
the largest, if not the most important, element in our 
mental life. The cause of its great and continued popu- 
larity is both obvious and fundamental. The vast majority 
of us are interested first in ourselves, and second in our 
next-door neighbours. The domestic novel shows us our 
own familiar life, the life of average, every-day humanity, 
but invested with an added interest and dignity by its 
translation into art. 

"For, don't you mark we're made so that we love 
First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see." l 

1 Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi. 



388 THE AGE OF POPE. 

To see this world of our daily life in the pages of fiction, 
is to see ourselves and our neighbours; to find our gossip 
and our daily newspapers given a depth and meaning 
which we are too shallow and too conventional to perceive. 
The group of writers who first claimed this world for English 
fiction make an era in the history of art. 

In 1740 Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), a London 
printer, short, plump, ruddy, and prosperous, began this 
new era by the publication of Pamela, or Virtue 
Kichardson. R ewar ded, the story of a "virtuous serving 
maid. " Richardson seems a strange leader for 
a new movement. Up to this time he had done nothing in 
literature, and the fact that this shy, demure, and highly 
estimable printer should, at the age of fifty, suddenly 
blossom into the novelist of sentiment, into a master in 
the intricate analysis of human passion, seems even more 
surprising than Defoe's late incursion into the realm of 
adventure. The fact is partly explained by Richardson's 
early and unconscious preparation for his task. In all 
his novels the story is told in a series of letters. Richard- 
son stumbled into fiction through his marked facility in 
letter-writing, as Defoe passed into it from journalism by 
almost imperceptible steps. When only a boy of thirteen, 
the future author of Pamela was intrusted by three young 
girls of his native town in Derbyshire with the delicate 
task of composing their love-letters, each confiding in him 
"unknown to the others;" "all," he tells us, "having a 
high opinion of my taciturnity." During his apprentice- 
ship to a London bookseller, he kept up a voluminous 
correspondence with a gentleman of cultivation who was 
greatly interested in him. The episode of the love-letters 
is one of especial significance in its bearing on his later 
work. Boys of thirteen are not usually distinguished by 
their warmth of sympathy with sentiment, but we should 
resist the natural temptation to look only at the ludicrous 



RICHARDSON. 389 

side of the situation, and see in it a proof of that intimate 
understanding of women which is one of the distinctive 
marks of Richardson's work. In Richardson there is a 
notable absence of that weakness and unreality in the 
women's characters, so often found in the best work 
of masculine novelists, which arises from an inability to 
appreciate the feminine point of view. On the contrary, 
the character of Clarissa Harlowe, in his greatest work, is 
admittedly a triumph of portraiture. There was some- 
thing in Richardson that invited feminine confidences, 
and the creator of Clarissa Harlowe gathered around him 
from boyhood to old age an admiring circle of women. 
"As a bashful and not a forward boy," he writes, "I was 
an early favourite with all the young women of taste and 
reading in the neighbourhood; " and long after he was 
described by Dr. Johnson as one who "took care to be 
always surrounded by women, who listened to him im- 
plicitly and did not venture to contradict his opinions." 
Richardson's object in his novels was avowedly a moral 
one. Pamela was the result of a suggestion on the part 
of some of his friends that he should treat of 
novels^ 8011 ' 8 ^ e concerns of common life in a series of familiar 
letters, prepared so as to be of use to " country 
readers, who were unable to indite for themselves." He 
announces on the title-page that the work is " Published in 
order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion." 
Richardson's three novels, Pamela (1740), Clarissa Harlowe 
(1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753), deal respectively 
with life in the humbler, higher, and aristocratic circles. 
In the first two the central character is that of the heroine ; 
in the last, Richardson, whose chief male characters had 
before this been despicable and unprincipled, attempts to 
make amends by manufacturing a fine gentleman, com- 
posed of all the virtues, and devoid of any redeeming grace 
of human weakness. An impossible aggregation of the 



390 THE AGE OF POPE. 



H 



r. v-3.5 :ne r-iol::i::cn ■:: f-z^.i.-z :na: rrir: :ne zervjLs 
cf Ezxe.y Fielding 1707-1754 :: the vrr::irz c: novels. 



Picldi^. 



£ ._ .:. 


. 


i r 


. ,^_. 




■*r "' 


pastv 


. Of C~ 


debos 


Lis e 


his ; 


'.'.',.".'.'... . 


c: :n: 


■ - i~/:z 


ic-allv 


TT-r- ~" - 






FIELDING. 391 

false sentiment in Pamela, which its author was too serious 
or too conventional to perceive. So The Adventures of 
Joseph Andrews (1742), a "virtuous serving man," sup- 
posed to be a brother of Pamela, was begun as a parody. 
But as the book grew, Fielding's interest carried him far 
beyond his primary intention, and the result was a great 
and original contribution to fiction. Fielding 
Srm iterary differed fro m his predecessor in literary form as 
well as in spirit. Instead of employing either the 
autobiographical or the epistolary form, he wrote his novels 
in the third person; introducing, from time to time, introduc- 
tory chapters in which he talks with his readers face to face. 
Fielding's novels were intended to be a kind of comic prose- 
epic, his purpose being to show the life of the time, especially 
on its ridiculous side, with the breadth, but not the dig- 
nity, of the epic manner. He was aptly called by Byron 
"the prose-Homer of human nature." Fielding's work is 
eminently natural; while we miss in him many of the subtler 
and finer qualities, in his grasp of fact, his manliness and 
solidity, he is manifestly the fellow-countryman of Chaucer, 
of Shakespeare, and of Browning. He hated cant and 
Pharisaism, and his large heart was very tender toward 
womanhood and goodness. The creator of the simple- 
hearted Parson Adams, of Amelia, with her woman's power 
to love and forgive, had under all outward roughness a 
reverent and genuine nature. 

Roderick Random, the earliest novel of Tobias Smol- 
lett (1721-1771), was published in 1748, the same year 
as Richardson's Clarissa Hdrlowe, and the year before 
Fielding's masterpiece Tom Jones. The foundations of 
the new fiction were thus securely laid with- 
in ten years from the appearance of Pamela. 
Smollett, the third of these pioneer novelists, was a Scotch 
physician, irascible, generous, and kindly, whose brave 
fight with ill-fortune had taught him much of the rougher 



392 THE AGE OF POPE. 

and sterner side of life. In his novels, his hard and varied 
experiences on sea and land were turned to good account. 
His pictures of life are vivid ; his humor coarse, but hearty ; 
his whole manner bluff, vigorous, and manly. In 1751 he 
published Peregrine Pickle, and in 1771, Humphrey Clinker, 
the most amusing of his books. 

While the realistic novel was thus establishing itself, 
an obscure clergyman in Yorkshire, Lawrence Sterne 
(1713-1768), suddenly became the literary sensation of 
London by the publication of a singular book en- 
titled The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 
Cent. (1759). Sterne, then forty-six, was acclaimed one 
of the greatest writers of his time. He died in 1768, and 
in his brief literary career completed Tristram Shandy and 
wrote a narrative of travel, A Sentimental Journey through 
France and Italy (1768). Tristram Shandy is rather a 
loosely connected succession of episodes, interspersed with 
whimsical and discoursive reflections, than a novel of any 
regular type. - It is almost without a plot, but the few 
leading characters emerge distinct and remarkable from the 
apparently careless flow of incident and reflection. Sterne 
ranks in this with the greatest masters of fiction, and few 
have created characters more original and diverting. 
While Sterne conforms more nearly to the narrative form 
than Addison, he is an essayist at heart, for like the famil- 
iar essayists, be is always revealing himself. 

The realistic school of fiction continued uppermost until 
well toward the end of the century, although the romantic 
spirit showed itself at times in such books as Walpole's 
Castle of Otranto (1764). About 1790, the effect of the 
mediseval revival on fiction was shown in the romances of 
Mrs. Radcliffe, and from this time to the coming of Miss 
Austen, the supremacy of the romance was assured. 



PAKT IV. 

THE MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD. 
(Since cm. 1725.) 

CHAPTER I. 
THE BEGINNING OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

(Cm. 1725-1830.) 

The history of England during the greater part of the 
eighteenth century is the history of rapid and comprehen- 
sive changes in almost every department of the 
eighteenth- nation's life — industrial, religious, political, 
century social, and intellectual. As we advance, the 
England of Pope and Addison, now well-nigh as 
remote from our daily life as that of Shakespeare or Milton, 
recedes with wonderful swiftness, and through a rapid suc- 
cession of changes we pass into the England of to-day. As 
we near the middle of the century the political corruption, 
the coldly intellectual temper, the studied repression and 
brilliant cynicism, melt before the fervour of a rising spirit- 
uality, and new generations, actuated by diametrically 
opposite ideals of life, crowd forward to displace the old. 
This fresh national life utters itself in new forms of litera- 
ture, and with the rise of Modern England we reach the 
beginning of a literary period surpassed only by that of 
the Elizabethans. 

We may relate many of these changes to one great motive 
cause. We have watched that mood of dissolute levity 
which immediately succeeded the Restoration pass into an 
era of comparative decency and frigid " good sense." Then 



394 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

Addison utters his kindly but somewhat superficial strict- 
ures on fashionable follies; then Pope is before us, with his 
little vanities and eomplaisant optimism; and Swift, savage, 
morose, and terrible, is intriguing and place-hunting like 
the rest, but with the bitter inward protest of contempt 
and scorn of such a world. Xow the nation was too inher- 
ently emotional and religious for such a mood to long endure ; 
the higher side of men's nature began to reassert itself; and 
those human hopes and longings which the "freezing 
reason''' cannot satisfy began to stir and claim their due, 

"And like a man in -wrath the heart 
Stood up and answer'd, ( I have felt.' " 

So in the drought of the desert men felt the gathering rush 
of new feelings, and as their hearts were again moved with 
pity, enthusiasm, and faith, they felt within them the great 
longing of the prodigal to arise and return. 

The new enthusiasm and faith are seen in a great wave 
of religious feeling that is associated with the rise of Metho- 
dism. In the midst of the cold intellectual 
Methodism, speculations of Bolingbroke, and the scepticism 
of Hume, we are startled by the passionate 
appeal of Whitefield and Wesley to the conscience and the' 
heart. By 173S the work of these men was fairly begun, 
and their marvellous eloquence and intense conviction 
struck deep into the souls of thousands. In his Analogy of 
Religion. Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and 
Voice of Nature (1736), Bishop Butler relied for his support 
of Christianity on close and definite reasoning, but the 
preaching of Whitefield made the tears trickle down the 
grimy faces of the Bristol colliers. This influence went 
far outside the ranks of the Methodists themselves. In the 
early years of the century, the Church of England shared 
in the prevailing coldness and unspirituality; the rilling of 
its offices was tainted by political intrigue, while its clergy 



METHODISM. 395 

were idle and often shamefully lax in manners and morals. 
Methodism, starting within the limits of the Church, 
helped to infuse into it, and into society at large, a new 
moral and spiritual earnestness. 

The effects of this revival of a more spiritual life in the 
midst of a jovial, unbelieving, and often coarse and brutal 
Deeper sym- society, are seen in the growth of a practical 
pathywith charity, and in an increasing sense of human 
brotherhood and of the inherent dignity of man- 
hood. English history contains few things more truly 
beautiful than the story of this awakening of tenderness 
and compassion. The novel sense of pity became wide 
and heartfelt enough to embrace not men only, but 
all wantonly hurt and suffering creatures. Bull-baiting 
gradually fell into disfavour, and the cruel sport known as 
bull-running was finally suppressed at Tutbury in 1778. 
The poet Thomson commends the labours of the " generous 
band," 

"Who, touched with human woe, redressive searched 
Into the horrors of the gloomy jail." x 

John Howard endured the noisome horrors of the Eng- 
lish prisons (1775-1789) that he might lighten the un- 
speakable sufferings of the captives; and Wilberforce, 
Clarkson, and Pitt laboured for the abolition of slavery. 2 
The criminal was no longer dragged through crowded 
London streets to be hanged at Tyburn, a holiday spectacle 
to jeering or admiring throngs; the rigours of the code 
which condemned wretches to death for a trifling theft 
were gradually softened. So, in these and countless other 
ways, the social revulsion against brutality and violence 

1 The Seasons, "Winter/' 1. 358. Thomson is speaking of a jail 
committee of 1729. See this whole passage from 1. 332-388, as a good 
instance of the new humanity in poetry. 

2 Clarkson and Wilberforce began their anti-slavery agitation about 
1787, enlisting the aid of Pitt. The Emancipation Bill was passed in 
1833. 



396 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

which marked the rise of a new England unmistakably 
declared itself. 

To some extent we may even associ ate this fuller power 
to feel with the rise and astonishing progress of modern 
Handel music, the art of pure emotion, both in Ger- 

many and England. Handel settled in Eng- 
land in 1710. He struggled for years against popular 
neglect and misunderstanding to win, toward the middle 
of the century, conspicuous recognition. It is significant 
to contrast the fashionable audiences that, lost to common 
decency, had once applauded the immoral wit of Wycher- 
ley or Farquhar, with that assembly, swept by a common 
wave of enthusiasm and worship, which rose with one 
consent and stood through the singing of the "Hallelujah 
Chorus." ■ 

A comparison of England under Walpole and under Pitt 
helps us to realise the growth of the power of enthusiasm 
and imagination. The administration of Robert 
2d Pitt. Wal P ole (1721-1742) was an interval of profound 
peace, during which the energies of England 
were largely given to trade and the development of her 
internal resources. Through the increase of the Colonial 
trade, and from other causes, the commercial and business 
side of life assumed a new importance. 2 The peace left 
men free to devote their energies to money-making; the 
merchant gained in social position, and wealth rapidly 
increased. 3 

Walpole, the guiding spirit of this prosperous period, 

1 The famous chorus of praise in Handel's Messiah. The per- 
formance referred to was in 1743. 

2 See Green's History of the English People, vol. iv. pp. 126-160. 

3 In the Spectator Sir Roger de Coverley stands for the landed 
gentry, and Sir Andrew Freeport, the city merchant, for the rising 
merchant class; v. Spectator, No. cxxvi.; v. also Scott's Rob Roy for 
contrast between the Tory squire, who stands by Church and King, 
and the new commercial magnate; v. Gibbin's Industrial History of 
England, p. 145, for reference to Scott's Rob Roy, etc. 



WALPOLE AND PITT. 397 

was the embodiment of its prosaic and mercantile char- 
acter. Country-bred, shrewd, and narrow-minded, he 
had great business ability, but was incapable of approach- 
ing life from its ideal or imaginative side. Openly cor- 
rupt in his political methods, and openly incredulous as 
to the possibility of conducting practical politics by other 
means, he laughed at appeals to man's higher nature as 
"schoolboy flights," and declared that men would come 
out of their rhapsodies about patriotism, and grow wiser. 
Such traits are characteristic of the early eighteenth- 
century England; we rightly associate that low estimate 
of human nature on which Walpole habitually acted with 
Pope's sneering contempt and Swift's fierce and appalling 
misanthropy. But, as we advance toward the middle of 
the century, those higher impulses which were manifest- 
ing themselves in so many different directions were at 
work in politics also. Before the fall of Walpole loftier 
and purer political ideals had already begun to take form 
in the so-called Patriot party, and by 1757 William Pitt, 
the animating spirit of the new government, was virtually 
at the head of affairs. A great historian has observed * 
that Pitt did a work for politics similar to that which 
Wesley was, at the same time, accomplishing for religion. 
He believed in his countrymen, and England responded 
to his trust. Instead of debauching public morals by 
open corruption, he made his passionate appeal to patriot- 
The expan- * sm * ^he interests of England, seemingly nar- 
sion of rowed in Walpole's time to insular limits, 

England. expanded before men's eyes, as, about the 
middle of the century, the nation entered upon that 
great duel with the rival power of France which was to 
raise her from an island monarchy to a world empire. 
Give's victory at Plassey in 1757 laid the foundation 
of her supremacy in India. Wolfe's capture of Quebec in 

1 S. R. Gardiner. Encyclopedia Britannica, title "England." 



398 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

1759 established her dominion in America. Two worlds, 
the rich civilisation of the ancient East, the vast and 
undeveloped resources of the new West, were almost at 
the same instant within her grasp. "We are forced," 
said Horace Walpole, "to ask every morning what victory 
there is, for fear of missing one." 1 Men's hearts were 
warm with a glow of patriotic pride and a sense of Eng- 
land's mighty destiny. Meanwhile, exploration as well 
as foreign war was helping to direct the thoughts and 
transfer the interests of Englishmen to distant and almost 
unknown lands. In 1744, Anson, a commander in the 
Royal Navy, returned to Europe after a perilous and 
brilliant voyage around the world. His account of the 
expedition, which appeared in 1748, was extraordinarily 
popular. In 1770, an even more famous navigator, 
Captain Cook, explored the east coast of Australia, and 
took possession of it in the name of Great Britain. Eigh- 
teen years later the first permanent English settlement 
was made on the site of the present city of Sydney, and the 
British colonial empire was definitely extended to these 
far-off waters of the Pacific. The story of Cook's various 
voyages (1773-1777-1784), like the records of the ex- 
plorers of Elizabeth's time, brought home a new world to 
the imagination, and as the vigour of the nation found 
an almost world-wide scope for its activities, Englishmen 
looked upon the most distant parts of the earth with a 
sense of possession. This more cosmopolitan spirit, this 
sense of the wonder and variety of the world's life, finds 
utterance in the literature. In Coleridge's Ancient Mariner 
the ship penetrates the solitudes about the South Pole, 
or lies becalmed in the awful loneliness and remoteness of 
the Southern Ocean. A widening horizon, a more cosmo- 
politan spirit, finds its way into literature. In Southey's 
Curse of Kehama we enter the world of the East, with 

1 See Green's History of the English People , vol. iv, p. 193. 



EXPANSION OF ENGLAND. 399 

its unknown gods; in Moore's Lalla Rookh we journey with 
a marriage cavalcade through the Vale of Cashmere, 
surrounded by all the splendours of the Orient; in Byron's 
Childe Harold the scenic background to the sombre figure 
of the pilgrim is Europe itself, brought before us with a 
sympathetic breadth and truth unmatched in the history 
of the literature. 

While patriotism and imagination were thus quickened 
by the great part that England began to play in the world- 
industrial w ide drama of human destiny, at home a silent 
and social revolution was transforming the aspect of life 
and the very structure of society. From the 
building of the first canal by James Brindley in 1761, new 
facilities for transportation and new methods of manufac- 
ture follow quickly on each other, until the agricultural 
England of old times becomes the industrial England of 
the nineteenth century, and the "workshop of the world." 
Following hard on these changes are those problems of 
labour and capital which confront our modern world. 

And side by side with all these new things are the initial 
steps in one of the greatest historic movements since the 
Renaissance, the rise of modern democracy. 
oTdemoc^cy With the conviction of human brotherhood, with 
and the age the passionate sense of the worth and dignity of 
tion eV ° 1U individual manhood, come the blood and vio- 
lence of those social upheavals which usher in 
our modern world. Men are possessed with a fever for 
the "rights of man;" they dream of a wholesale re- 
organisation of society, and the coming of an idyllic 
Golden Age; they struggle to convert Rousseau's gospel 
of a "return to nature" into a practical reality. In 
America, a Republic is established on the foundations 
of human freedom and equality; in feudal France, after 
generations of -dumb misery, the people lift their bowed 
backs from labour to wreak on their rulers the accumu- 



400 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

lated vengeance of centuries. The finest spirits of Eng- 
land are thrilled and exalted by this flood of enthusiasm 
for the cause of man, the word "liberty" sounds as a talis- 
man in men's ears, and the spirit of revolution controls and 
inspires the best productions of the literature. 

We have noted the working of new forces in English 

society in Wesley and Pitt during the earlier half of the 

eighteenth century, or from about 1740. Modern 

Literature J ; 

after the England, thus beginning to take shape even dur- 
death of } n g ^ lifetime of Pope and Walpole, had a litera- 
ture of its own; but the older literary methods 
and ideas by no means came to an end with the beginning of 
the new. Accordingly, after the rise of this new literature, 
or from about 1725, we find the literature of England flow- 
ing, as it were, in two separate streams. The one, marked 
by a mode or fashion of writing which began definitely with 
Dryden, may be traced from Dryden on through Pope, its 
most perfect representative, through Samuel Johnson, until 
its dissipation in the time of Wordsworth; the other, spring- 
ing from a different source and of a different spirit, its purer 
and more natural music audible almost before that of Pope 
has fairly begun, flows on with gathered force and volume, 
and with deepening channel, almost to our own time. We 
have traced the first of these streams until the death of 
Pope; we must now indicate the general direction of its 
course after that event. Many of the features which had 
characterised this Restoration literature in the reign of 
Anne were prolonged far into the century, and some writers 
modelled their style on Pope and Addison until toward the 
century's close. The prosaic spirit, in which intellectual 
force was warmed by no glow of passion, continued to find 
a suitable form of expression in didactic and satiric verse. 
In the protracted moralisings of Young's Night Thoughts 
(1742-1745), and in Blair's Grave (1743), a shorter but 
somewhat similar poem, we detect a general resemblance 



OLD AND NEW. 401 

to the Essay on Man; while Henry Brooke's poem on The 
Universal Beauty (1735), and Erasmus Darwin's Botanic 
Garden (1791), obviously echo the favourite metrical ca- 
dence of Pope. In the two works last named, poetry is 
called in to expound science instead of theology or philo- 
sophy, but the tone is none the less didactic ; and it is worth 
noting that in The Botanic Garden the Rosicrucian sylphs 
and gnomes of The Rape of the Lock reappear as personifi- 
cations of the elemental forces of nature. 

But there is something more important for us to notice 
than such single instances of the survival of the early lite- 
rary spirit. For forty years after the death of 
Johnson. Pope, the greatest personal force in English lit- 
erature and criticism, the dominant power in the 
literary circles of London was Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), 
a man whose sympathies lay with the literary standards of 
the earlier part of the century, and who had but little 
comprehension of the new spirit which, in his lifetime, was 
beginning to displace them. Johnson, the son of a poor 
bookseller in Lichfield, came up to London in 1737, with 
three acts of a play in his pocket, and the determination to 
make his way through literature. For many years his life 
was one of terrible hardship, but he bore his privations 
manfully, with unflinching courage, and with a beautiful 
tenderness toward those yet more unfortunate. He ob- 
tained employment on a periodical, The Gentleman's Maga- 
zine, and soon afterward made a great hit by his satire of 
London (1738), a poem which attracted the favourable 
notice of Pope. He wrote another satire, The Vanity of 
Human Wishes (1749), conducted The Rambler (March 20, 
1750, to March 14, 1752) and The Idler (April, 1758, to 
April, 1760), papers similar in design to The Tatler and 
The Spectator, and in 1755 published his English Dictionary. 
Shortly after the accession of George III. Johnson's burdens 
were lifted by the grant of a pension of three hundred 



402 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

pounds a year. During the remainder of his life he ruled as 
the literary autocrat of London. He was the leading spirit 
in a Literary Club founded by him in 1764 in conjunc- 
tion with the painter. Sir Joshua Reynolds. Burke, Gold- 
smith, Garrick, Fox, Gibbon, and Sheridan were members 
of this club, yet among such men Johnson maintained his 
supremacy. Macaulay says that the "verdicts pronounced 
by this conclave on new books were speedily known all over 
London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a 
day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk- 
maker and the pastry-cook." 1 After writing several other 
prose-works, Johnson died December 13, 1784, full of years 
and honours. "We find strength, wisdom, and sound com- 
mon sense in Johnson's works ; yet nothing among all his 
laborious compositions has given the world such lasting 
delight as Gray's Elegy, a single poem by his shy and then 
comparatively obscure contemporary. In truth, neither the 
extent of Johnson's influence, nor the greatness of his place 
in literature, -can be truly measured by his books alone. 
" The old philosopher is still among us," his peculiarities 
of dress and manner, his opinions, his prejudices, his very 
words, survive for posterity in that marvelous Life of Johnson 
(1791), by his devoted friend and admirer James Boswell 
(1740-1795) , which has been called the greatest of all biogra- 
phies. Johnson dominated his contemporaries by his massive 
personality, as well as by his books, and he lives on, and talks 
on, in the pages of Boswell, to delight and instruct us to-day. 
W nile Johnson wrote some strong, quotable verse, he 
was preeminently a prose-writer in an age of prose. We 
have seen how, during the greater part of his 
prosiwriter century, the uninspired temper of the time 
of an age of found prose a congenial medium ; how the close 
pros adherence to fact found a new vehicle of expres- 

sion in the realistic novel; but apart from this the century 
witnessed a remarkable growth of prose — in history, theol- 

1 A.rticle on " Johnson," Encyclopedia Britannica. 



JOHNSON. 403 

ogy, philosophy, political economy, and in law. During its 
middle years David Hume (1711-1776), William Robert- 
son (1721-1793), and Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) brought 
the art of historical writing to a higher excellence than it 
had yet attained in England. Although Gibbon is the only 
member of this group whose work remains as a really lasting 
contribution to historical literature, the histories of both 
Robertson and Hume had an important influence on his- 
torical writing. Gibbon, one of the great historians of 
the world, gave his life to a single mighty work, his History 
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), 
and built the massive structure of his masterpiece with 
such minute attention to accuracy of detail, and such a 
comprehensive genius for the symmetry and grandeur of 
the general plan, that his work remains unrivalled. While 
an era was thus made in historical writing, Sir William 
Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England 
(1765), performed an unparalleled service for English juris- 
prudence, Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations (1776), 
re-created the science of political economy, and a great 
political literature grew up under the genius of Burke. 
Yet in such an age Johnson remains a central figure. He 
was remotely connected with the development of the novel 
by his didactic story of Rasselas (1759); his Lives of the 
Poets (1777-1781), while by no means free from character- 
istic limitations, is probably his most lasting contribution 
to literature. Yet Johnson belonged to a time that was 
passing. His poems of London and The Vanity of Human 
Wishes follow the satiric style made popular by Dryden 
and Pope, a style greatly in vogue when Johnson began his 
literary career; and are as obviously modelled after Pope in 
their versification and manner. The Rambler is as plainly 
imitated from The Tatler and The Spectator, although 
through Johnson's ponderous, many-syllabled style it fol- 
lows them, in the clever phrase of Lady Mary Wortley 



404 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

Montagu, ''as a pack-horse follows a hunter." Yet while 
Johnson thus stands as the bulwark of the old order, both 
by his own work and by his critical verdicts on that of 
others, all about him new agitations were already rife. 
Absolute as was his literary dictatorship, his throne was 
reared on the verge of that revolution which begins the 
modern period of our literary history. The industrial and 
social England, the rise of which we have suggested, was 
taking shape between Johnson's arrival in London in 1737 
and his death in 17S4: new feelings utterly opposed to 
many of his traditions and prejudices, and alien to his un- 
derstanding and habits of thought, were quickening into 
life around him. While he held steadily to. the ancient 
ways, those changes in literary standards had already 
begun which have led to the reversal of nearly every im- 
portant dictum uttered by this great literary law-giver in 
matters of criticism. 

The changing spirit of England expressed itself through 
literature as jt did through religion, politics, and social 
m , t life. This new spirit in literature which from 

Tne ch.ar- r „ 

acteristics about the first quarter of the century became 
of the new increasingly apparent, was at once a result of 

literature. , rr _ . ; . . , . 

those wide-spread changes which characterise the 

time, and also one of those forces which altered men's out- 
look on life and helped to push England on a new path. 
Before speaking of some of the authors prominent in this 
movement, it will be helpful to gain some idea of its chief 
characteristics. 

I. The new literature concerns itself distinctively with 
the country, as the old literature did with the town. Pope, 

Addison. Gay. and Swift had given London the 
t^NatSr g° ss ip ot " the Coffee-houses, the miseries and 

malignities of Grub Street., the gay, petty world 
of fashion, or the current politics and philosophy. The new 
poetry led men's thoughts away from these things into the 



RETURN TO NATURE. 405 

sunshine and the open fields; it transported the inveterate 
Londoner into a world which he had half forgotten, or 
never really known, a world of plough-land and sheep- 
fold, of mountain, lake, and glen; a world that beside the 
eagerness and noise of the city, seemed quiet, self-sufficient, 
and remote. This increasing fondness for country subjects 
is usually spoken of as "the return to Nature." It was even 
more than this, it was the discovery of Nature. These 
poets did something more than come back to the old world 
of earth and sky; they gradually discovered and estab- 
lished a new relation with them; they gave them a new 
part in man's spiritual life, so that the nature-poetry in 
which these feelings found its most complete expression is 
an embodiment of a new view of Nature rather than the 
return to an old one. 

II. This new literature was distinguished by a deeper 
and a more comprehensive love of man. That deep feel- 
The new m &> which* as the eighteenth century advanced, 
sympathy prompted men to turn from the artificial life of 
with man. SO ciety to the world of Nature, was closely 
associated with a sympathetic interest in the lives of the 
country-folk and the poor. The representative writers of 
Queen Anne's time had despised and satirised humanity. 
We have seen Pope's low estimate of it, his malice towards 
men, his ingrained disbelief in women; we have seen Swift's 
fierce and cynical misanthropy. In a long succession of 
writers from James Thomson to Wordsworth, we observe 
that sympathy for human misery and misfortune, that ever 
deepening admiration for human nature, that love of lib- 
erty, and that belief in human brotherhood, which we 
have already seen in the social development of this time. 

III. This deeper humanity, that was making literature 
more gentle and compassionate, also declared itself in a 
sympathy with children and with the home. In the writ- 
ings of the great representatives of the Classical School 



406 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. . 

childhood has no place. But as poets came to view life 
with a greater tenderness and a deeper understanding, 
their hearts were touched by the helplessness and loving 
dependence of little children, and they felt that childhood 
had in it something wonderful and sacred. This convic- 
tion, more or less vaguely present in the poetry of Blake, 
finds a definite and philosophical expression in Words- 
worth's great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from 
Recollections of Early Childhood. During the latter part of 
the century a number of notable stories for children were 
composed by Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Day, and others, 
and authors wrote for children as well as about them. The 
quiet and secluded life of the home also found its interpre- 
ters, in Gray, Burns, Wordsworth, and many other poets 
of the new school. Nor was this sympathy restricted to 
humanity or to the world of inanimate Nature; it stooped 
to the creatures below man, to the hare, the field-mouse, 
the water-fowl, even to the very worm beneath our feet. 
This feeling is particularly evident in the poetry of Cowper 
and of Burns. 

IV. We notice in this new poetry an increasing tendency 
to revert both to the manner and the spirit of the great 
English poets who preceded Dryden and Pope. The 
supremacy of the heroic verse, the decasyllabic couplet, 
popularised by Dryden and perfected by Pope, was dis- 
puted, and here and there poets began to take Milton 
and Spenser as models of poetic form. When Milton chose 
blank verse as the metre of Paradise Lost, he did so in 
deliberate opposition to the prevailing fashion and the 
best critical taste of the time. But by the beginning of 
the eighteenth century the despised verse had its admiring 
imitators, and as the century advanced it became a 
favourite metre of the poets of the new school. Milton's 
influence is also apparent in the eighteenth-century imi- 
tations of his V Allegro and II Penseroso. Some of the poets 



THE NEW SPIRIT. 407 

of the new order who were trying, whether consciously 
or not, to free themselves from the rule of Pope, turned 
naturally to Spenser, the poet who was in almost every 
respect Pope's opposite, and in their hands not only 
Spenser's stanza but his romantic spirit were revived. 

V. With these new tendencies we must associate a 
longing to escape from the world of commonplace fact and 
every-day experiences, into some strange, untried region 
of the imagination, remote from the prosaic and the 
familiar. The supremacy of "common sense" was pass- 
ing; a love of strong or strange emotions began to mani- 
fest itself, and men found pleasure in a poetry which in- 
spired feelings of wonder, awe, horror, melancholy, or 
mysterious fear. Men found various avenues of escape 
from that prosaic atmosphere which they now felt to be 
Stirling and confined. But the original impulse of this 
whole movement was the desire to break down the bars 
which the writers of the Classical School had so carefully 
set up; to get out of doors, to get away from the town, 
to break through the conventions, to experience new 
sensations, to find a wider area for feeling and imagination. 
Just as men realised that there was a world outside of 
London, they realised that there was a world outside of 
England, and the same impulse which drove the poets 
from Grub Street to the fields, drove them to seek for new 
subjects in far-off and unfamiliar lands, or in remote and 
less artificial times. Some sought fresh pastures in the 
East: William Collins wrote some so-called Persian 
Eclogues (1742); Bishop Percy translated a Chinese 
romance; Goldsmith wrote his Chinese Letters (1760). 
James Macpherson was attracted by the long-neglected 
poetry of the Celt, and published his version of the old 
legend of Ossian, the great traditional poet of the Gael. 
Gray turned to the almost equally forgotten poetry and 
mythology of Iceland and the North, or introduced into 



408 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

one of his great odes a Bard of Celtic Wales. William 
Beckford wrote his oriental romance of Vathek. Others 
again collected or imitated the ballads of the common 
people, which had been long disregarded as outside the 
bounds of literature. To turn away from poetry of a 
more academic and literary order, and to come back to 
these ballads, filled as they were with primitive passions, 
with primitive and superstitious fears, was, in a very real 
sense, to come back to Nature. And, moved by this 
desire to escape from the commonplace, men entered the 
enchanted ground of chivalry and romance. It was but 
natural that writers in search of "beauty with strange- 
ness," of something picturesque, heroic and unfamiliar, 
should find in the Middle Ages something particularly 
suited to their needs. It was natural that in their recoil 
from a time which seemed to them flippant, sceptical, and 
prosaic, men should take shelter in those ages of romance 
and knightly heroism, of wonder and of faith. So, during 
the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was a 
growing interest in everything belonging to this special 
period of the past: in its costume, its architecture, its 
manners, its literature. This delight in the Middle Ages, 
which is commonly called the Mediceval Revival, found 
its greatest interpreter in Sir Walter Scott. 

These varied and comprehensive changes were not 
brought about by any one man, nor were they effected in 
a single generation. To appreciate the gradual transition 
from the old literature to the new, from the Age of Dryden 
and of Pope to the Age of Wordsworth and of Shelley, we 
must now turn to some of the writers who led the way 
into the new land. 

One fact impresses us at the outset : the important part 
taken by Scottish men of letters in this reaction from the 
restrictions of the Classical School. The return of poetry 
to Nature definitely begins with Allan Ramsay and James 



THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL. 409 

Thomson, both of them children of the Scottish Lowlands. 
Ramsay, born in 1686, was familiar in his boyhood with 
the picturesque and mountainous scenery of Lanarkshire. 
When he was about fifteen he was sent to Edinburgh, 
where he became a prosperous and popular wig-maker 
and book-seller. Ramsay was a man of cheerful temper, 
and as he was interested in books and fond of a jest, his 
shop became a favourite place of literary and social resort. 
He was neither an heroic figure nor a great poet, but the 
influence on poetry of this short, amiable, plump little book- 
seller was greater than that of many a greater man. He 
had a liking for the old popular literature, and he published 
two collections of early Scottish songs and poems {The 
Evergreen, 1724, and The Tea Table Miscellany, 1724). 
He was thus one of the pioneers in that revival of interest 
in the popular lyrical poetry which prepared the way for 
Robert Burns. Ramsay's best and most ambitious work, 
The Gentle Shepherd (published in its complete form in 
1725), appears to have been intended as a deliberate 
protest against the unreality of the prevailing style of 
pastoral poetry. The Gentle Shepherd has no great poeti- 
cal merit, but when compared with the sham pastorals 
of the artificial school, it shows a genuine appreciation of 
natural scenery and of country life. If it does not alto- 
gether escape the conventional, it is at least a notable 
attempt to picture the Scotch rustic as he was. Instead 
of the classic Damon and Daphne, those thin shadows of 
a shade, instead of Strephon promising to sacrifice a milk- 
white bull to Phcebus on the banks of the Thames, 1 we 
have plain Patie and Roger, we have a simple picture of 
domestic life: 

"At e'en when he comes weary frae the hill, 
I'll hae a' things made ready to his will. 
In Winter, when he toils thro' wind and rain, 
A bleezing ingle, and a clean hearth-stane; 

1 See Pope's Pastorals, "Spring," 1. 45. 



410 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

And soon as he flings by his plaid and staff, 
The seething pat's be ready to take aff ; 
Clean hag-a-bag I'll spread upon his board, 
And serve him wi' the best we can afford." * 

In such lines as these we feel that poetry has already 
found a new source of beauty and of power; we see that it 
has got back to something primary and fundamental, and 
our thoughts revert to that description of a Frisian house- 
hold, written perhaps a thousand years before Ramsay's 
time, which tells us how a sailor's wife welcomes her 
husband home. This trait of domesticity apparent in 
Ramsey, reasserts itself in Gray's Elegy, and even more 
strongly in The Cotter's Saturday Night of Burns. 2 

James Thomson, whose name we have associated with 
Ramsay's as a pioneer of the new poetry, was a man of far 
greater influence and importance, and in him 
the tendencies of the new literature were much 
more distinctly manifest. He was born in 1700, the year 
of the death of Dryden, at Ednam, a village a few miles 
from Kelso, in the. beautiful valley of the Tweed. A year 
later his father removed to Southdean, near Jedborough, a 
retired spot on the slopes of the Cheviot Hills. Here, in 
the most picturesque and romantic surroundings, the 
future poet of Nature passed his boyhood. His fondness 
for poetry showed itself very early, and in 1725 he left the 
University of Edinburgh without taking his degree, and 
came to London. His poem of Winter appeared in the 
following year. Encouraged by its success, Thomson pub- 
lished Summer, Spring, and Autumn, and in 1730 the four 
poems appeared together under the title of The Seasons. 
The Seasons begins a new era in the Nature-poetry of Eng- 
land, and possibly of Modern Europe. In Ramsay, the 

1 Gentle Shepherd, Act i. Sc. 2. 

2 Cf. especially the stanza in the Elegy: "For them no more the 
blazing hearth shall burn," and "th' expectant wee-things, toddlin', 
8tacher thro'," etc., in The Cotter's Saturday Night. 



THOMSON. 411 

descriptions of nature are merely incidental, and the land- 
scape is made a mere background to the rustic drama. 
But in Thomson, Nature herself, seen under the chang- 
ing aspects of the four seasons, is the chief theme. The 
traditional practice of the poets is reversed, and while in 
The Seasons we come upon harvesters, sheep-shearers, or 
youthful lovers, they are hardly more than picturesque 
features in the landscape, subordinate to that majestic 
world in which they play their little parts. Thomson, 
while he wrote with the power of a fresh inspiration, is 
often stilted and even tedious. But while he does not en- 
tirely escape from the artificiality of the prevailing poetic 
diction, The Seasons in the breadth and originality of its 
conception, and in the essential truth of its descriptions, 
is both a great and a memorable poem. He had opened 
men's eyes and showed to Londoners the way to the fields. 
Dr. Johnson, that inveterate Londoner, has defined the 
nature of Thomson's great achievement in one memorable 
sentence : " The reader of The Seasons wonders that he never 
saw before what Thomson shows him, and that he never yet 
has felt what Thomson impresses." 1 The mission of the new 
poetry could hardly be more briefly or more happily defined. 
We cannot dwell here on other aspects of Thomson's 
work, on his enthusiasm for liberty, his distrust of cities, 
his sympathy with man, but we note his appreciation of 
England's widening power. In 1740, the year of the fall 
of Walpole, when war had recently been declared with 
Spain, Thomson foreshadowed the greatness of England's 
destiny as a sea-power in verses which became the National 

Song: 

"When Britain first, at Heaven's command, 
Arose from out the azure main, 
This was the charter of the land, 

And guardian angels sang this strain: 
Rule, Britannia! rule the waves! 
Britons never will be slaves." 

1 Lives of the Poets : " Thomson." 



412 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

From the time of the publication of The Seasons we find a 
growing delight in nature and a further departure from the 
Gray, Col- poetic style and spirit of Pope. In 1726, the year 
lins, Dyer, of the appearance of Thomson's Winter, John 
Dyer, a native of a wild and beautiful region of 
Southern Wales, published his descriptive poem of Grongar 
Hill. Dyer, like Ramsay and Thomson, had learned to 
know and to love nature in his youth, and in Grongar Hill 
and in his later poem of the Fleece (1757), he drew men's 
thoughts away from the city and helped them to see and 
to feel. Thus "from remote Scotland and from Southern 
Wales came a gift to English poetry which neither Grub 
Street nor Twickenham could bestow." As the century 
advanced, this departure from the older poetic standards 
found many representatives until it finally passed from an 
instinctive divergence into a complete and conscious re- 
volt. We find some of the characteristics of the new spirit 
in Somerville's Chase (1735), a vigorous poem on the de- 
light of hunting, and in Shenstone's Schoolmistress (1737). 
Towards the middle of the century (1746), we reach the 
delicately musical Odes of William Collins, and the im- 
mortal Elegy in a Country Churchyard of Thomas Gray 
(1751). The poetry of both Collins and Gray is remark- 
able for lyrical melody, exquisite finish of workmanship, 
and sentiment. Collins had the finer and rarer lyrical gift. 
Gray, while always fastidiously correct and restrained, is 
less ethereal than Collins, and, less remote from ordinary 
human feelings and interests. Both men turned from the 
world of the prosaic. Gray explored old myths, or sought 
some quiet scene, congenial to contemplation. Collins 
was attracted by mystery and splendour. Collins, writes 
Dr. Johnson, "delighted to roam through the meanders 
of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden 
palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens." * 

1 Life of " Collins " in Lives of the Poets. 



POETRY OF NATURE. 413 

It is this quest for the mysterious and the remote which is 
evident in Collins's Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the 
Highlands of Scotland, a poem which illustrates that aspect 
of the romantic revival which has been called " the Renais- 
sance of Wonder." Gray in the Elegy, and Collins in the 
Ode to Evening, are the poets of twilight, and Collins es- 
pecially contrives to invest the darkening landscape with 
dreaminess and unreality. Other poets of the time paint 
Nature in her varied aspects, if in a less subtly poetic mood. 
In Goldsmith's Traveller (1764), we look down on the life 
on the earth, on — 

" Lakes, forests, cities, plains extending wide," 

and contemplate Nature in all her variety as the theatre of 
human activity. In his Deserted Village (1770), as in Gray's 
Elegy, we read "the short and simple annals of the poor." 

In the Minstrel (Bk. i. 1771), James Beattie (1735- 
1803) shows us a youthful poet whose genius was nourished 
and inspired by the influence of mountain, sea, and sky. 
This poetry of natural description was continued by 
George Crabbe (1754-1832), whose work, written in an 
unaffected and somewhat homely style, possesses vigour, 
earnestness, and truth. Cowper, Burns, and others con- 
tributed to this nature-poetry, until it found its greatest 
prophet in William Wordsworth. 

These poets of "the discovery of Nature" were almost 
equally poets of the spirit of a widening humanity. Gray's 
The new ^ e 9V 1S> more than a charming rural vignette, 
poetry of more than a meditation on life's " inevitable 
Man ' end, "it is above all a testimony to the essential 

value of obscure and humble lives. The Deserted Village 
is an indignant protest against the wealth and luxury 
which encroach upon the simple happiness of the peasant, 
and in such lines as these we hear the voice of the new 
democracy: 



414 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay: 
Princes and lords may -flourish or may fade — 
A breath can maize them as a breath has made — 
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, 
When once destroyed can never be supplied." 

Crabbe brought the realism of the earlier part of the 
century to the painting of the homely and often repulsive 
life of the country poor. In the opening lines of The 
Village he scorns the artificial pastoral of the older school, 
and declares — 

"I paint the cot 
As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not." : 

The delight in nature, the renewal of a religious fervour, 
the sense of human brotherhood, the love of animals, all 
find expression in the life and work of Cowper. Essen- 
tially the same feelings are the motive power in the poetry 
of Blake, and Burns, and Wordsworth. 

This change in the subjects and in the spirit of poetry 
was accompanied by a corresponding change in poetic 
The chang-es f° rm - Dmmg the years when the French 
in poetic influence was uppermost, the decasyllabic coup- 
form, ^t was employed in longer poems, almost to 
the exclusion of any other form of verse. Dryden sought 
to substitute it for the blank verse of the Elizabethans. 
Milton's refusal to use it in Paradise Lost was in such 
flagrant defiance of the critical canons of the day that 
sundry well-meaning admirers of the substance of that 
great epic paraphrased it in the sovereign metre to remove 
its harsh irregularity in form. 3 

We find one explanation of the extravagant popularity 

1 The Deserted Village, 1. 51, etc. 
8 The Village^ Bk. i. See the entire opening passage. 
3 See article in Andover Review, January, 1891, "Some Paraphrasers 
of Milton." 



POETIC FORM. 415 

of this verse in its perfect adaptability to the poetic needs 
of the time. The heroic couplet, as employed by Pope, 
by its pauses falling with "a somewhat monotonous re- 
currence at the end of the line, lent itself to that clear, 
terse, and epigrammatic manner in which the age de- 
lighted. Instead of the slow evolution of the Miltonic 
sentence, complex in structure, with the "sense variously 
drawn out from one verse (i.e., line) to the next," we 
have sentences so broken up and packed in handy packages 
of two lines each, that one can snatch up a couplet almost 
anywhere, and carry it off for quoting purposes. But 
from about 1726 the sovereignty of the heroic couplet 
was broken, and the reviving influence of the Elizabethan 
poets showed itself in a recurrence to their poetic manner. 
Lowell has aptly dubbed Pope's favourite metre, "the 
rocking-horse measure," and doubtless people began to 
weary of the monotonous regularity of its rise and fall. In 
The Seasons, Thomson not only turned to Nature, he 
abandoned the heroic couplet for blank verse. The 
Spenserian stanza, 1 which had been discarded except by a 
few obscure experimentalists, grew in favour, and was 
employed in Shenst one's Schoolmistress (1742), Thomson's 
Castle of Indolence, Beattie's Minstrel, and in a number of 
minor poems. Meanwhile Collins 's Odes marked the 
advent of a poet with the fresh, inborn lyrical impulse. 
By virtue of this incommunicable gift of song, Collins 
mounts above the monotonous levels of didactic verse 
that stretch about him. Admirable poetry had been pro- 
duced in England since the death of Milton, but its ex- 
cellence was chiefly of a kind that could be subjected to a 
critical analysis and accounted for. The means, rhetorical 

1 V. Beers's English Romanticism — XVIII > Century, chap, iii., 
and the chapter on the Spenserian revival, in Phelps's Beginning of the 
English Romantic Movement; also Appendix I. of the same book, for 
list of Spenserian imitators. 



416 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

or otherwise, employed by Dryden and Pope to produce 
a given effect, are, to a great extent, comprehensible to us, 
while* we applaud the result as a triumph of premeditated 
art. But in the refined and gentle charm of Collins, in 
the subdued and softened beauty of his colouring, and the 
lingering and delicate grace of his lyrical movements, we 
encounter excellence of a wholly different order; we are 
aware of an indefinable poetic quality the presence of 
which, unlike the excellence of Pope, can only be fully 
recognised by the artistic sense, inasmuch as it is, by its 
very nature, incapable of proof. Thomson wrote of 
Nature with surprising minuteness and accuracy, but 
Collins with the inspired touch of a higher sympathy. 
Swinburne says of him: "Among all English poets, he 
has, it seems to me, the closest affinity to our great con- 
temporary school of French landscape painters. Corot 
on canvas might have signed his Ode to Evening. Millet 
might have given us some of his graver studies, and left 
them, as he did, no whit the less sweet for their softly 
austere and simply tender gravity." 1 

In the last quarter of the century William Blake (1757- 
1827) holds an important place in the advance of the new 
school of poetry. This singular man, richly gifted as 
painter as well as poet, was eccentric to the very verge of 
madness. Indeed, most of his work seems to hover on the 
dubious border-land between insanity and reason, yet so 
wonderful is it that we are uncertain whether we should 
attribute its strangeness to the poet's wildness, or to our 
conventional dulness of perception. Nevertheless, in 
certain important particulars, Blake's poetry was strongly 
expressive of the tendencies of his time. He, too, takes up 
again the interrupted strain of the Elizabethans, recalling 
not merely their disused metre, but their gusts of passion- 
ate intensity and bold flights of imagination. Thus the 

1 Critical essay in Ward's English Poets, vol. iii. title "Collins." 



SHAKESPEAREAN REVIVALS, 417 

spirited dramatic fragment Edward III} is instinct with 
the lavish and vaulting energy of Marlowe. 2 On the other 
hand, many poems of Blake's are remarkable for a limpid 
and inspired simplicity which made him the predecessor 
of Wordsworth. In his love of children and of animals, 
in his profound sympathy with suffering, in his lyrical 
beauty, and in his feeling for Nature, he represents the 
best tendencies of his time. 

While in literature the influence of the Elizabethans 
was thus overcoming those foreign fashions which for a 
• k and ^ me ^ ac ^ su P erse ded it, on the stage the great- 
the Shakes- est productions of Shakespeare were being 
pearean brought vividly home to the popular life and 
imagination. Acting, like literature and life, 
threw aside some of its burden of stiffness and artificiality, 
and, after the conventional mannerisms and declamation 
of such actors as Macklin and Quin, the comparative truth 
and naturalness of Garrick took London by storm. Gar- 
rick's great London triumph dates from his performance 
of Richard III. at Drury Lane in 1741, after he had won 
recognition in the provincial theatres. His influence on 
the popular taste may be conjectured from the fact that 
he played in no less than seventeen Shakespearean parts, 
and produced twenty-four of Shakespeare's plays during 
his management at Drury Lane. Garrick retired in 
1776. 

Mrs. Siddons, one of the greatest of tragic actresses, 
whose Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine are among 
the proudest traditions of the English stage, won her first 
success in London in 1782, her brother, John Kemble, 
appearing the following year. Through these mighty 

1 "Blake imitated Spenser, and in his short fragment of Edward III. 
we hear again the note of Marlowe's violent imagination." — Brooke's 
Primer English Literature, p. 165. 

J According to Gilchrist this fragment was "printed in 1783, written 
1768-1777."— Gilchrist's Life of Blake, i. p. 26. 



418 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

actors the stage fell in with and helped forward the 
revolution against the taste and standards of the critical 
school. 

The labours of" a succession of Shakespearean editors 
and critics had preceded this noble interpretation of his 
dramas on the stage. In 1709, Nicholas Rowe published 
the first critical edition of Shakespeare. This edition con- 
tains the earliest formal account of Shakespeare's life. 
Nearly a quarter of a century had passed since the publi- 
cation of the last collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, 
the so-called Fourth Folio of 1685, but after the appear- 
ance of Rowe's work one edition of Shakespeare followed 
another in comparatively rapid succession. The un- 
paralleled greatness of Shakespeare was more and more fully 
recognised. Critical patronage of him as an untutored 
genius, a prodigy handicapped by his lack of art, changed 
into unqualified admiration and homage, until his pre- 
eminence as an artist as well as a poet was revealed in 
the criticisms pf Coleridge and Hazlett. 

With this growing appreciation of Shakespeare, we may 
connect the publication of Robert Dodsley's Collection 

of Old Plays in 1744, a book which did much 
Old Plays ^° rev i ve interest in the Elizabethan drama and 

make "an epoch in aesthetics." * 
The last feature of this new literature which we have to 
consider is the revival of a sympathetic interest in the 

Middle Ages. This, as has been said, was not 
vlTEevivaL an independent or unrelated movement, it was 

but another outward sign of the fundamental 
and reactionary change which was taking place in the 
spiritual life of the nation. Like those other phases of 
the new literature which we have just considered, this 
Mediaeval Revival was an outcome of the Renaissance of 
feeling, imagination, wonder, and faith. To understand 
1 Lowell, Essay on "Gray." 



THE MEDIAEVAL REVIVAL. 419 

the emancipation of English literature from the time of 
Ramsay to the time of Wordsworth, we must grasp the 
essential unity that underlies all its superficial variety, and 
see that in all its phases it is but a part of the emancipa- 
tion of England herself. 

The revival of interest in Gothic architecture, chivalry, 
and the world of the Middle Ages, did not take definite 
shape in England until about 1750. It was in this year, or 
shortly after, that Horace Walpole began to build himself 
a "little Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill." Walpole, the 
son of the great Prime Minister, was a leader of wit and 
fashion. He dabbled in authorship, had the reputation of 
being a connoisseur, and his Gothic castle stocked with 
relics of the days of chivalry helped to make medievalism 
popular. The movement was helped forward by the pub- 
lication of Richard HurcVs Letters on Chivalry and Romance 
(1762), a book designed to show the superiority of Gothic 
to classic subjects for poetical purposes. In 1764, Walpole 
published his extravagant little romance The Castle of 
Otranto, the precursor of many a ghastly story of blood and 
mystery, and that famous collection of old ballads, Bishop 
Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, appeared in the 
year following. Percy's Reliques was one of the influential 
books of the century. It did more than any previous col- 
lection to promote an interest in the preservation of the old 
ballads, and it fostered a love of the ballad poetry. It was 
the pattern for many similar collections (Herd's Ballads, 
1769, Scott's Minstrelsy, 1802-1803, Motherwell's Ancient 
Minstrelsy, 1827, etc.), and poets began to take the old bal- 
lad form as their model. By far the most noteworthy of 
these early imitations are the ballads of Thomas Chatter- 
ton (1752-1770), amazing poems which their boy-author 
professed to have copied from some ancient manuscripts. 
Chatterton, the child of a subchanter in the Bristol cathe- 
dral, grew up under the spell of antiquity. He was born 



420 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

in Bristol, almost within the shadow of the beautiful old 
Church of St. Mary Redcliffe; he learned his alphabet from 
the illuminated letters on some old manuscript music. He 
would lie on the graves, gazing on the slender, soaring spire 
of St. Mary's, re-creating the world of mediaeval Bristol 
in his imagination. As Ramsay, Thomson, and Words- 
worth were children of the world of Nature, brought up on 
the green lap of the earth, so Chatterton, drawn to the past 
by the intuition of genius or by some mysterious tendency 
of his age, surrounded by the relics and survivals of the 
past, was a child of the Middle Ages. Such was the pop- 
ularity of Percy's Reliqaes that the influence of the old 
ballad poetry became wide-spread. Thus, Goldsmith wrote 
his simple ballad The Hermit (1765), 1 and Shenstone, Jemmy 
Dawson (1745). 

Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Christabel are a noble 
outcome of the old ballad literature, and from it also sprang 
the best poetry of Walter Scott. 

When we classify and arrange all these stupendous 
changes in the 'external conditions of men's lives, and in 
men's mental and spiritual estimate of life's 
meaning and purpose, the great and peculiar 
place of the eighteenth century in history begins to take 
shape in our minds. We see that it bears a relation to our 
modern civilisation similar to that which the fourteenth 
century held to the Renaissance. Looked at from the ex- 
ternal or material side, w T e are able to feel the force of Mr. 
Frederic Harrison's words : " Every one can state for him- 
self the hyperbolic contrast between the material condition 
we see to-day and the material condition in which society 
managed to live over two or three centuries ago, nay, ten, 

1 Goldsmith was accused of taking the idea of this ballad from " The 
Friar of Orders Grey" (Percy's Reliques), which appeared in the same 
year (1765). He claimed to have read The Hermit to Bishop Percy 
before the publication of the " Friar." 



SUMMARY. 421 

or twenty, or a hundred centuries ago. . . . The last hun- 
dred years/' that is, since about 1770 or 1780, "have seen 
in England the most sudden change in our material and 
external life that is recorded in history." * When we en- 
deavour to grasp this transition period, not only externally, 
but from every side, we see that its beginning dates from 
the last years of the administration of Walpole, or from 
about 1730 or 1740. To that decade we have referred the 
rise or growth of a new spirit in religion, politics, literature, 
and even music. Its close is marked by England's entrance 
upon her long struggle with France for the prize of half the 
world. Between 1755 and 1765 we find those improve- 
ments in transportation and manufactures which begin 
the "industrial revolution," and at the end of this decade 
Watt's utilisation of steam adds its tremendous impetus 
to the movement. From about this time the advance to- 
ward democracy becomes more rapid and apparent. We 
enter the era of a bold opposition to authority in John 
Wilkes and the Letters of Junius ; of the admission of re- 
porters to the House of Commons and the consequent in- 
crease in the power of the press ; of the American and French 
Revolutions, and of the outburst in literature of the revolu- 
tionary spirit. From this time also we date the beginning 
of the Mediaeval Revival. Finally, we may group many 
of these changes about two centres : (a) that longing for a 
more simple and natural life and the revolt against ac- 
cepted standards which accompanied a renaissance of the 
more religious and ideal elements in society; (b) that feel- 
ing of compassion for suffering, that sense of the worth of 
the individual, which we associate with the growth of 
democracy. 

The two great historic movements of the century define 
themselves as: 

1 Essay on "The Nineteenth Century," in The Choice of Books, 
p, 424, etc. 



422 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

1. The expansion of England into a world power. 

2. The rise of democracy, with all those industrial and 
social changes which accompany and forward it. 

The effect of these movements on literature has been 
great in the past, and is likely to be enormous in the future. 

OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 

(1728-1774.) 

Goldsmith's relation to the literary and social move- 
ments just sketched is both interesting and important, 
yet so great is the purely human attraction of his life and 
character that our thoughts instinctively turn first to the 
man himself. There are few men in the annals of English 
literature with whom we have a greater sense of com- 
panionship. His very "frailties/' as Dr. Johnson com- 
passionately called them, his heedless extravagance, his 
harmless and childlike vanity, but stir our sympathies and 
endear him to us the more. Blundering, inconsequent, 
and pathetic as' his life is, it is illuminated by a purity 
and simple goodness of nature which no hard experiences 
were able to soil or impair. Careless for himself, he cared 
— if often impulsively and inconsiderately — for others. 
He had a wonderful power of loving, and Thackeray has 
ventured to pronounce him "the most beloved of English 
writers." To know and love Goldsmith is to strengthen 
our own love of goodness; to increase our confidence in 
human nature; to grow more gentle and pitiful toward 
weakness and error. Moreover, to know Goldsmith is to 
increase our appreciation of his works, for his works are 
but a partial expression of the man himself. 

Although his family is said to have been originally of 
English stock, Oliver Goldsmith was Irish in disposition 
as well as by birth. He was born in November, 1728, at 
Pallas, an insignificant village in County Longford, remote 



GOLDSMITH. 423 

from the main highways of travel, where his father, the 
Rev. Charles Goldsmith, was curate. When Goldsmith 

was about two years old, his father became 
Ireland. rector of a parish in Westmeath, and removed to 

the village of Lissoy, in the southwestern part 
of that county. When William Howitt visited it, in the 
early half of the last century, Lissoy consisted "of a few 
common cottages by the roadside, on a flat and by no 
means particularly interesting scene," 1 yet life there 
seems to have been sturdy, wholesome, and good-humoured. 
Goldsmith looked back to its placid pleasures with a 
pathetic fondness, and memories of it mingled with his 
description of Auburn in The Deserted Village. 

No doubt Goldsmith grew up under much the same 
conditions as those of thousands of his contemporaries. 
At school he was thought "impenetrably stupid," and 
something — which seems to have stuck to him through 
life — made him the butt of his companions. He was 
thickset and ugly, his face disfigured by an early attack 
of smallpox, and the consciousness of his personal defects 
doubtless increased the shyness and morbid sensitiveness 
of his disposition. Yet his ordinary experiences, and the 
kindly life of his father's simple household, gave Gold- 
smith the materials for enduring works of art. The guile- 
lessness, charity, and unworldliness which draw our 
hearts toward Dr. Primrose in The Vicar of Wake-field 
were characteristic of the Goldsmith family, as they were 
of Goldsmith himself, and it is beautiful to think that 
this kindliness, which took no thought for the morrow, 
should at length have come to have its share in the crea- 
tion of some of the most perfect and lovable characters 
in the literature. In after years, Goldsmith's early recol- 
lections of his father were embodied in his description of 
the "preacher," in The Deserted Village, the man who 
1 Haunts and Homes of British Poets, " Goldsmith." 



424 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

"ran his godly race," "remote from towns," "more bent 
to raise the wretched, than to rise;" they entered into his 
sketch of "The Man in Black'' in The Citizen of the World, 
and, above all, they found a yet fuller expression in The 
Vicar of Wakefield} 

At seventeen Goldsmith entered Trinity College, Dublin, 
as a "sizar," or free scholar. At this time the "sizars" 
were virtually part student, part servant, and Goldsmith 
suffered many humiliations which his sensitive nature 
found it hard to endure. Here he was idle and fond of 
pleasure, and spent much time in playing on the flute. 
After his graduation in 1749 he returned to the coun- 
try to wander in easy aimlessness from the house of one 
relative to another, while his family were debating what 
was to be done with him. In 1752, one of his relatives 
^.. _ . having declared that he would "make a good 

Edinburgh ° ° 

and the medical man," he left for Edinburgh to study 
Continent, medicine. Becoming restless, after about eigh- 
teen months, he embarked for a tour on the Continent, 
with the ostensible purpose of continuing his studies. 
Here he led a wandering life, learning little medicine, 
but gaining that knowledge of European countries which 
he was to make use of in The Traveller. When he left 
Leyden he wandered with his flute through the country 
districts of Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing 
"merry tunes" that often set the peasants dancing and 
gained him food and lodging. In Italy, where the musical 
taste seems to have been too exacting for his powers, he is 
supposed, like the wandering scholars of the Middle Ages, to 
have gained a dinner and a bed by disputing on questions 
of philosophy at the universities and convents. After a 
year of this strolling life he landed in England in 1756, with 
no prospects and with a few half-pence in his pocket. 

1 Cf., also, the character of Honey wood in The Good-natured Man 
As an instance of the impression left by early recollections, see Gold- 
smith's tribute to his brother Henry in The Traveller. 



GOLDSMITH. 425 

On arriving in London Goldsmith was face to face with 
the problem of keeping himself alive. He is supposed to 

have been usher in a school ; he was an apothe- 
in London carv ' s assistant, but gave up the place to invest 

in a second-hand velvet coat and set up as a 
medical practitioner. At last, driven by his necessities, he 
became a bookseller's drudge. He laboured anonymously 
at whatever task was set him, publishing among other 
works his Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning in 
Europe (1759). From this time until his death Gold- 
smith's life was chiefly given up to task-work for the pub- 
lishers, interspersed with those masterpieces which are 
the more spontaneous utterances of his genius. In spite 
of his desultory education and lack of exact learning, 
he had great qualifications for success; a varied expe- 
rience, fine powers of observation, a sympathetic nature, 
and, above all, a style of extraordinary ease and charm. 
He did foolish things, but often wrote wise ones, show- 
ing on paper, as in many places in The Citizen of the 
World, a breadth and justness of thought with which 
he is not always credited. After the publication of the 
Enquiry his fortunes gradually improved. In 1761 he 
made the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, who became his 
literary friend and helper. The appearance in 1760 of 
The Citizen of the World added to his reputation, which 
was still further increased by the publication of his first 
important poem, The Traveller, in 1764. He was taken 
into the exclusive literary circles, and, with Johnson, 
Reynolds, and Burke, was one of the original members 
of the Literary Club. As his expenses continually outran 
his earnings, his writing consisted largely of work done 
to order. He was neither an historian nor a naturalist, 
yet he wrote histories of Rome, Greece, and England, 
which won great popularity, and a book on Natural His- 
tory. The secret of the success of these works was their 



426 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

charm and attractiveness of style. His epitaph in West- 
minster Abbey declares that he touched nothing he did 
not Morn. " He is now writing a Natural History," said 
Johnson, "and he will make it as agreeable as a Persian 
tale." Yet it is on work of another class that his repu- 
tation really rests. From time to time he turned from 
his drudgery to add a classic to literature — his idyllic 
Vicar of Wakefield (1766), The Good-natured Man (1768), 
The Deserted Village (1770), and She Stoops to Conquer 
(1773). These works brought him fame, but he was 
continually worried by money difficulties, and toward 
the last the strain told even on his easy-going and buoy- 
ant temperament. In the midst of the worries, gaieties, 
and honours of his life in London, Goldsmith's thoughts 
would go back longingly to the peaceful and sheltered 
obscurity of his early village life. Such feelings seem 
to have prompted many passages in The Deserted Village. 
In fair Auburn he sees Lissoy again as through a golden 
mist of distance, and he confides to us his desire to return 
after all his wanderings and his "long vexations" and 
"die at home at last." His life was to have no such 
peaceful close; his "vexations" only thickened about 
him toward the last. Overwhelmed by debts, worried 
by creditors, struggling to the last to free himself of his 
burdens by his pen, he was seized at forty-six with illness. 
His last words were an admission that his mind was not 
at rest. He died in April, 1774, owing two thousand 
pounds — a big bill at his tailor's among the rest ; but 
let us remember, too, that, when he lay dying, the stair- 
case leading to his room was filled with poor outcasts 
whom he had befriended. 

When we reflect upon the erratic and ill-ordered char- 
acter of Goldsmith's life, and upon the amount of hackwork 
that he was forced to do to pay for his luxuries or quiet 
the demands of importunate creditors, we are astonished 



GOLDSMITH. 427 

at the high excellence he actually attained in many de- 
partments of literature. He takes high rank 
Goldsmith's amon g ^ ne essayists of his century; he gave us 
two of the most charming poems written in 
England in his generation; he infused into the novel a new 
sweetness and purity, producing in The Vicar of Wakefield 
a kind of prose-pastoral which Carlyle pronounced "the 
best of all modern idyls;" and finally, in his two comedies, 
The Good-natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer, he not 
only made a lasting contribution to literature, but led a 
reaction against a less natural and more sentimental 
school of comedy and helped to make a new era in the 
history of the English drama. This wide range of Gold- 
smith's best work connects him closely with many of the 
most important literary movements which were going on 
about him. When he entered upon his work, England had 
already begun to escape from the ascendency of Pope, and 
evidences of that wide-spread national change which has 
been before described were yearly increasing. Yet during 
the fifteen years of Goldsmith's literary activity, from 1759 
to 1774, his friend Johnson, who stood upon the ancient 
ways, was the literary autocrat of London. The work of 
Goldsmith stands midway between the writers of the new 
His place school and of the old, belonging wholly to 
in literary neither, sharing in the qualities of both, and, 
in some cases, admirably illustrating the tran- 
sition from the one to the other. Thus in The Bee, a series 
of short essays which originally appeared in periodical form, 
he is one of the many followers of Addison and Steele. In 
The Citizen of the World, supposed to be the correspondence 
between a Chinese philosopher on a visit to England and 
his friend at home, the divergence from The Spectator 
slightly widens. Finally, in The Vicar of Wakefield, Gold- 
smith leaves the essay for the novel, and thus exemplifies 
a transition which was an important feature in the literary 



428 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE, 

history of his century, The Vicar of Wakefield lies close 

to the new rural spirit of its time, and may be 

Wakefield 0I appropriately contrasted with The Rape oj the 

Lock. It is of the country, as Pope's masterpiece 
is of the town. Goldsmith preaches virtue, simplicity, and 
contentment; Pope displays the world of fashion,, extrava- 
gance, and artifice. In Goldsmith's story the air is fresh 
and wholesome; the misanthropy of Pope and Swift is 
left behind. and ; as Walter Scott declared, "we bless the 
memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us 
to human nature.'" In their spirit Goldsmith's two most 
famous poems. The Traveller and The Descried Village, are 
close to the new literary and social England, but in form 
they continue the heroic couplet of the older school. The 
fact is significant of Goldsmith's general relation to the 
history of English poetry; he filled the old bottles with new 
wine. The Traveller, indeed, retains some of the didactic 
flavour of the older school, but it sets us in the midst of a 
wide expanse of. nature, it looks down on the nations from 
the mountain-peak, and bids us realise that the inequali- 
ties in the lot of man are less great than we suppose. The 
poem shows that cosmopolitan temper, rare in the insular 
English, which is remarkable in The Citizen of : : \e World. 

In The Deserted Village the new spirit is yet more apparent. 
We are in a world that Pope knew not. or else cared not to 

depict ; the little, contracted world of the village. 
Y^ 8 I) g Serted where life if narrow, is simple, natural, and 

happy. There the preacher and the school- 
master, fill a large place: there too are those rollick- 
ing country sports, in which Goldsmith himself once loved 
to share. The picture may be partly an ideal one. yet the 
description is full of details, suggested by actual experiences. 
which give to the whole an astonishing solidity and reality. 
There may not have been such a village in the British 
Isles, but Auburn exists for us in the world of art. In 



BURKE. 429 

U Allegro, Milton invested rural England with a softened 
and poetic charm. Herrick gave us a glimpse of Yuletide 
frolics, and of merry countryfolk among the hawthorn hedge- 
rows of May Day; but Goldsmith's Auburn is more than a 
beautiful idyllic fancy; it is a deliberate protest against the 
oppression of the poor, against luxury and the evils which 
follow in its train. 1 Although Goldsmith's life was hardly 
in accordance with his doctrine; although he loved to trick 
out his homely person with finery — too often, alas! unpaid 
for, — he seems to have had at heart a longing for that 
"plain living " that Wordsworth was not to preach, merely, 
but to practise. Two things were mingled in his life as in 
his art; he is a follower of the earlier England, yet he belongs 
by nature to that newer England that was near at hand. 
His place in literature is not the highest, but it is secure. 
He did not compete for the greatest prizes, but what he 
attempted he accomplished, and the things that he did 
best could hardly be done better. His ideals are sweet and 
wholesome; his humour gracious and free from malice ; his 
work full of ease and naturalness, and pervaded by an 
indefinable and enduring grace and charm. 

EDMUND BURKE. 

(1729-1797.) 

Five years before Goldsmith settled in London after his 
wanderings on the Continent, another young Irishman, 
Edmund Burke, had come to the capital, to begin 
Goidsndth. there an even more memorable career. It is inter- 
esting to study the lives of these two men together, 
for, while in many ways they were widely different, Burke's 
broad relation to the political movements of the time is 
similar to that which Goldsmith holds toward its literary 

1 Cf. what is said of this poem on pp. 413, 414. 



430 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE 

history. Like Goldsmith, Burke represents a time of tran- 
sition, belonging both to the old order and to the new. 
More than he realised, he helped forward the political 
changes which marked his time, yet one of his strongest 
feelings was his reverence for the past. 

Edmund Burke was the son of a Dublin attorney, and 
was born in that city in 1729. He entered Trinity College, 
Dublin, at fourteen, two years before Goldsmith, 
who was, it will be remembered, about a year 
his senior. In 1750, after taking his bachelor's degree, 
Burke came up to London and began the study of the law. 
He afterward expressed great respect for the law as a science 
and means of mental discipline, but from his boyhood he 
had showed a fondness for literature, writing verses at col- 
lege, and being pursued with what he called the juror poeti- 
cus. His interest in literary matters, when legal studies 
were supposed to be his first object, so displeased his father, 
who was high-tempered and bent on seeing his son a barris- 
ter, that he cut. off, or greatly reduced, Burke ? s allowance. 
Thus in or about 1755, the year before Goldsmith began 
his battle with London, Burke was left to push his own 
way in a city which was none too kindly a muse to strug- 
gling authors. We know little of the details, for Burke 
maintained a dignified reserve in regard to his early strug- 
gles, but we know the difficulties and the results. "I was 
not/ 5 he said afterward, " . . . swaddled, and rocked, and 
dandled into a legislator. ' Nitor in adversum' is the motto 
for a man like me." 

Burke's career as an author began in 1756 with the publi- 
cation of a cleverly written essay. A Vindication of Natural 
Society, followed in the same year by A Philosoph- 

aotlua aS 2 ' c ^ I n( l u by ^ nto ^ le 0' r W Ln °f our Id eas °f fi ie S^- 
Ume and Beautiful. The first purported to be a 

posthumous publication of Pope's friend, Lord Bolingbroke, 

and is a skilful imitation of Bolingbroke's manner, The 



BURKE. 431 

arguments its supposed author had advanced against re- 
vealed religion are here employed against the organisation 
of society, with the intention of showing that as they are 
obviously unsound in the political sphere, they are equally 
so in the religious. Both of these works show promise, but 
neither is among Burke's greatest efforts. 

Launched into authorship, Burke naturally began to take 
his place in the literary life about him. He met Johnson and 
his followers, and when the Literary Club was 
andpoiTtics started, in 1764, was one of its founders. 1 Mean- 
while his studies were turning from purely literary 
and artistic matters to history and the existing problems 
of society and government. The changed direction of his 
thoughts is shown by the publication of a work on the 
settlement of America, and of an Annual Register of the 
most important public events of each year (1759-1788). 
Such work was an admirable preparation for a successful 
Parliamentary career. In 1765 Burke definitely entered 
politics by becoming secretary to Lord Rockingham, who 
had just succeeded Grenville as Prime Minister. The diffi- 
culty with the American Colonies was one of the gravest 
questions the new ministry had to face, and Burke, who 
had obtained a seat in the House of Commons (1765), won 
immediate distinction by a speech on the repeal of the 
Stamp Act. It was the beginning of a long and impressive 
public career, extending over nearly thirty years. It was 
a period to call out the full powers of an orator, the wisest 
judgment of a statesman. The people were restive under 
the arbitrary rule of George III., and the contest over the 
right of Wilkes to a seat in Parliament showed that Parlia- 
ment itself was rather an instrument of tryanny than a 
safeguard of liberty. In these years India was won, Amer- 
ica was lost; Warren Hastings was impeached for misgov- 
ernment of India in one of the most imposing and dramatic 

1 See pp. 402 and 425, supra. 



432 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

trials in English annals; the French Revolution was begun, 
and Europe witnessed the Reign of Terror. ' On nearly 
every one of these subjects Burke has given us a master- 
piece. The troubled times of John Wilkes were the occa- 
sion of his Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770). a 
restrained and well-reasoned discussion of the dangers 
which then threatened English liberty. It warns men that 
Thoughts on ar bitrary power may disguise itself under the 
the present vcrv forms of free government, and that a Par- 
discontents. liament . which has become the servant of the 

king instead of the representative of the people, is. in fact, 
an instrument of servitude. The clear perception of the 
truth that liberty lies deeper than laws and institutions is 
characteristic of Burke's power to strip off the formal and 
conventional, and lay hold of the vital truth. The dispute 
with America called forth three of Burke's best 
America ° n s P eecaes < anc ^ placed him with the greatest sup- 
porters of the Colonists. In his Speech on Concil- 
iation wvthAmegpwa, perhaps the finest of the three, he brushes 
away the legal question of the right of England to tax the 
Colonies, and rests the argument on the broader ground of 
expediency and common sense. The legal right to do a 
certain thing does not prove that the thing should be done. 
''The question with me is not whether you have a right to 
render your people miserable, but whether it is not your 
interest to make them happy." ■ 

An English statesman and critic goes so far as to say 
that these speeches of Burke on American affairs "are al- 
most the one monument of the struggle on which 
Hastings. a ^ over of English greatness can look with pride." 2 
Burke's advocacy of liberty in the rising colonies 
of the West was followed by his championship of justice and 

1 Conciliation with America; Burke's works. 

2 John Morley; article on Burke in Encyclopedia Britamiica, ninth 
edition. 



BURKE. 433 

humanity in the newly won dependency of India. In the 
trial of Warren Hastings before the House of Lords, the 
burden of the impeachment rested mainly on Burke. He 
declared that "the cause of Asia" was "being tried in the 
presence of Europe;" and there is a breadth and largeness 
in his treatment which lifts us to the height of that great 
argument. We feel that it is even more than the cause of 
Asia ; it is the cause of that new humanity which was grow- 
ing stronger in the England of Burke's time. These distant 
Orientals, whose wrongs and sufferings had been unknown 
or unregarded, were thus brought into the range of the 
nation's imagination and sympathy. They too were men, 
with men's rights; and Burke impeached Hastings in the 
name of the " eternal laws of justice which he had violated," 
and "of human nature itself." l 

On these three great occasions Burke was on the side of 
liberty and justice; but with a genuine devotion to what 
he called "a well-regulated liberty," he was by 
?ervati S sm° n " na ^ ure a conservative, with an innate veneration 
for the British Constitution and a love and rever- 
ence for the past. John Morley has said that Burke believed 
in government for the people, but not by the people. The 
overthrow of social order by the Revolution in France, its 
violence, its abstract, and, as he thought, visionary doc- 
trine of human rights, shocked and alarmed him, and at 
the outbreak of the Revolution, he threw the full force of 
his vast powers into a book — Reflections on the Revolution 
in France (1790) — which remains one of the literary 
monuments of the time. While Burke could not see far 
enough to discern the ultimate outcome of the Revolution, 
he detected, as many enthusiasts about him failed to do, 
the signs of weakness and disaster, and foretold that fail- 
ure which, to him, was its only apparent consequence. 
" Believe me, sir," he wrote, "those who attempt to level 

1 Impeachment of Warren Hastings. Opening Speech: Fourth Day. 



434 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

never equalise." He looked back upon the cherished ideals 
and institutions of historic Europe, and felt that their very 
existence was hanging in the balance. "People," he de- 
clared, "will not look forward to posterity who never look 
back to their ancestors." In the insults offered to the 
beautiful and unhappy Marie Antoinette he saw the signal 
of the death of chivalry. "The age of chivalry is gone. 
That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has suc- 
ceeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever." l 

The conclusion of the trial of Hastings in 1794 was fol- 
lowed by Burke's retirement from Parliament. In the 
same year he was prostrated by the death of his son, a blow 
from which he never fully recovered. His grief utters itself 
in words that read like the lament of David over Absalom : 
"The storm has gone over me. ... I am alone. I have 
none to meet my enemies in the gate. . . . They who ought 
to have succeeded me are gone before me." Burke's health 
was broken, but in his Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796- 
1797), written almost in the presence of death, he declaimed 
with impassioned and almost frantic energy against any 
truce with France, which he called a "pretended republic 
of murderers, robbers, and atheists." He solemnly de- 
clared that his words, though they might have the weak- 
ness, had at least the sincerity, of a dying declaration. He 
died soon after, at his country-place at Beaconsfield, July 
9, 1797. 

The fame of the man of letters and that of the statesman, 
the orator, or even the political writer, are usually entirely 
Burke as a distinct. Even a great writer's permanent place 
man of in literature is seldom based on his contributions 
letters. ^ Q con t e mporary politics, however effective and 
popular they may have been at the time. To this Burke is a 
singular exception. Nearly all his works are political, while 
his few contributions toother subjects have made no material 

1 For all these passages, v. Reflections on the French Revolution. 



BURKE. 435 

addition to his fame. He is, perhaps, the only great Eng- 
lish statesman who is recognised as a great author because 
of the permanent value and literary interest of his political 
writings and speeches alone. To some degree this striking 
fact may be due to the historic importance and the dra- 
matic interest of many of the subjects with which Burke's 
genius was engaged. It is due, moreover, to the fact that 
Burke brought to the discussion of these subjects distinctly 
literary gifts and a feeling for style which made him one of 
the great masters of English prose. He was capable of re- 
strained, lucid, and dispassionate argument and exposition 
as in the Thoughts on the Present Discontents, and of gor- 
geous descriptions or passionate outbursts of pathos or 
denunciation. The majestic flow of his eloquence, with its 
full, rounded sentences, gives to some of his orations an epic 
volume and grandeur. In this, and in the beauty and 
variety of his historical and literary allusions, Burke seems, 
in his loftiest moods, a prose Milton. The tribute to Marie 
Antoinette, 1 the description of the destruction of the Car- 
natic by Hyder Ali, 2 the picture of the ambassadors of 
Europe waiting to present their suit for peace to the " bloody 
ruffian" Carnot, 3 such passages are celebrated in the history 
of English prose style. But beyond all this, the enduring 
fibre in Burke's writings lies in their philosophic thought. 
In his treatment of current politics he is not merely the 

orator, the poet, the master of style; he is pre- 
thinker. 10 eminently the thinker, able to rise above purely 

contemporary interests. He was the reverse of 
a political theorist, but he combined with a quick eye for 
the immediate and practical exigencies of a situation a pro- 
found insight into the principles on which the foundations 
of society rest. His works are rich in a political wisdom, 

1 Reflections on the French Revolution. 

2 Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts. 
9 Letters on a Regicide Peace, i. 



436 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

in maxims and observations that reach far beyond the 
particular existing conditions which called them forth. 
Particular cases are viewed in the light of some general 
truths, and become illustrations of those secret forces 
which produce and sustain the social order. Hence Burke 
has been called the greatest thinker, with the single excep- 
tion of Bacon, "who has ever devoted himself to the 
practice of English politics." 1 

WILLIAM COWPER. 
(1731-1800.) 

The life of Cowper is one of the strangest and the saddest 
in literary history. A man of shy, gentle nature, shrink- 
ing instinctively from the rough conflicts of life, it was his 
lot to live in a time of struggle, excitement, and change. 
Born in the high noon of the Age of Pope, and dying after 
the Age of Wordsworth and Coleridge had definitely begun, 
Cowper's life covers nearly the whole of that period of tran- 
sition, that era of national adjustment to new conditions 
and ideals, which we have endeavoured to describe. Y\ nile 
Pitt, Wesley, Burke, Warren Hastings, Captain Cook, 
James Watt, and many another man of action, were making 
modern England, while English industry, pluck, and enter- 
prise were determining the destiny of half the world, 
Cowper led one of the most outwardly uneventful and mono- 
tonous of lives. More than half of his days were spent in the 
quiet seclusion of an English village. From this ''retreat," 
environed by placid country scenes, shut in by the narrow 
interests of a provincial society, he looked out on the great 
world from "a safe distance." He saw in imagination the 
stir of the "great Babel," but he did not "feel the crowd." 2 
Yet so marvellous a gift is genius, this timid recluse was not 

1 Buckle's History of Civilisation in Europe, chap, vii, 
8 See The Task, beginning of Bk. iv. 



COWPER. 437 

a mere idle spectator; shut away from the world, he was 
the interpreter of that spirit of change which was guiding 
the course of history. 

William Cowper was born in 1731 in Great Berkhamp- 
stead, an ancient and picturesque town in Hertfordshire. 
His father, Rev. John Cowper, came of an old and honour- 
able family; his mother was related to the poet Donne. 
Cowper was granted a few years of happiness before he 
began his long struggle with himself and with the world. 
Towards the close of his life he looked back with regret 
and tenderness to "the pastoral house," as he called his 
father's rectory, and recalled the trivial incidents of his 
early childhood there, with a pathetic clearness of recol- 
lection. 1 But sorrow came to him very early. He was 
acutely sensitive, and of an affectionate and clinging 
nature. His father, an upright gentleman, was too pre- 
occupied, or, perhaps, too rigid and unimaginative, to 
understand or sympathise with such a son. All his child- 
life centred in his mother, and, when he was six years 
old, his mother died. To lose his mother was, to a child 
in Cowper's situation, to be left alone. More than half 
a century after his mother's death he still remembered 
the smile that had comforted his childish griefs, and 
longed to hear his mother's voice. 

"O that those lips had language! Life has passed 
With me but roughly since I heard thee last." 2 

It is hardly too much to say that Cowper's loss made 
him homeless as well as motherless, since from this time 
his life was almost entirely passed away from his father's 
house. Very soon after his mother's death he was "taken 

1 See passage beginning — 

" Where once we dwelt, our name is heard no more," 
— in Lines on the Receipt of My Mother's Picture. 

* Lines on the Receipt of My Mother's Picture, 



438 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

from the nursery" and entered at a neighbouring school. 
Here, the timid, gentle child of six, the memory of his 
recent grief still fresh within him, was an easy prey for 
the young barbarians, too common at that time in the 
schools of England. His chief tormentor was a brutal 
bully of fifteen; and poor Cowper, who did not dare to 
lift his eyes to the face of his persecutor, said in after 
life that he "knew him better by his shoe-buckles than 
by any other part of his dress. " 1 At ten Cowper was sent 
to the great school of Westminster, where Warren Hast- 
ings, the future ruler of India, and Charles Churchill, 
the satiric poet, were among his schoolfellows. Cowper's 
second experience of school-life seems to have been more 
fortunate than his first, for in one of his poems he speaks 
with evident sympathy of the Englishman's pleasant recol- 
lections of his school days : 

"Be it a weakness, it deserves some praise, 
We love the play-place of our early days ; 
The jscene is touching, and the heart is stone 
That feels not at that sight, and feels at none." 8 

At eighteen Cowper left Westminster and began the 
study of the law, for which he had little aptitude. He 
led an idle, aimless existence, apparently careless of the 
future, and spending more money than he could afford. 
He loved harmless gaiety and fine clothes; he wrote 
verses, and became an occasional contributor to the Con- 
noisseur, a periodical of the approved eighteenth-century 
pattern. But Cowper had a deep-seated tendency to 
melancholy, and his high spirits began to be interrupted 
by intervals of depression. In 1763, through the in- 
fluence of his uncle, Cowper had the opportunity of ob- 
taining an excellent government post. To do this, he 
was obliged to pass an examination before the House of 

1 Cowper's Memoir. 

5 Cowper's Tirocinium; or, a Review of Schools. 



COWPER. 439 

Lords. To Cowper, this examination, which was often, 
in fact, a merely formal matter, seemed a terrible ordeal. 
He straggled frantically to prepare himself, but he could 
neither face the trial with composure, nor, in justice to 
his uncle, decline the appointment. The strain was too 
great for one of Cowper's nervous temperament, and 
his over-wrought mind gave way. 

After two years in an asylum for the insane, Cowper 
was sufficiently restored to be set at liberty, but all hopes 
of a successful career for him were at an end. He had 
had his chance, and lost; and at thirty-four he seemed a 
beaten man, weak in body and in mind. He was accord- 
ingly established at Huntingdon, a quiet old town near 
the river Ouse, in 1765. He was, to use his own compar- 
ison, "a stricken deer" who had "left the herd.''' The 
"great Babel," as he called London, had become terrible 
to him, and he found in those placid country-scenes among 
which the remainder of his life was passed, a hiding-place 
and a shelter. He loved to wander along the banks of 
the Ouse, — 

"Low winding through a level plain 
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er." 

He loved to watch the labourers at their wholesome tasks ? 
and all the simple, natural sights and sounds about him, 
brought healing to his mind. 

Soon after he came to Huntingdon he went to live with 
a family named Unwin, and found in their house a true 
home. The Unwins were gentle, amiable, and devout, 
and in their quiet household Cowper led the life of a reli- 
gious recluse. After Mr. Unwin's death in 1767, Cowper 
and Mrs. Unwin moved to Olney, a village in Bucking- 
hamshire inseparably associated with his memory and 
his walks. Cowper's friendship for the Unwins was one 
of the controlling influences of his life. He became the 



440 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

poet of the home: he pictured in The Task, the family 
gathered contentedly around an English fireside on a 
winter's evening, and a new sense of the worth and 
sacredness of family life arose in men's minds. We owe 
this picture of ''home-bom happiness " to Mrs. Lnwin. 
who gaA'e Cowper, a lonely and half distracted man, 
almost the only home that he had ever known. She 
gave him years of sympathetic companionship; she was 
the ''dear companion" of his walks; she watched over 
him in health, and she nursed him with the tenderness 
of a mother when the awful night of insanity again dark- 
ened his spirits. 

Before he left Huntingdon, Cowper had made the ac- 
quaintance of the Rev. John Newton (1725-1S07), a curate 
at Olney, who was prominent in the religious revival begun 
by Wesley. Xewton induced Cowper to write hymns, 
in the belief that some mental occupation might be of 
benefit. But nothing could avert the return of Cowper' s 
malady, and a second attack of his disease left Cowper 
shattered in body and mind. Tormented by the belief 
that he had been doomed to eternal punishment, he tried 
to find a temporary relief and distraction in trifles. He 
worked in his garden: he diverted himself with the antics 
of his pet hares. Puss. Tiney. and Bess, as some condemned 
prisoner watches the spider in his dungeon. He tried 
to amuse himself with birds, with his dog. with a squirrel, 
with carpenter- work, with chawing — with making 
verses. Cowper, although he had written hymns and 
occasional verses before this, was about fifty years old 
when he finally entered upon his work as a poet. But 
this middle-aged and broken man. who at first experi- 
mented with verse-making for his diversion, proved to 
be one of the most charming and probably the most 
representative poet of his generation. 

The superiority of Cowper s later work has caused these 



COWPER. 441 

earlier poems to be unduly neglected. They are moral 
essays in verse on some abstract topic, — The 
' Progress of Error, Truth, Hope, Charity, — and 
they follow in general the manner of Pope and his school. 
But the newer, more unconventional spirit is present in 
them also, struggling to break through the restrictions 
of the prevailing poetic form. Cowper saw that this 
form, however excellent it may have been in the hands 
of such an artist as Pope, had outlived its usefulness; 
that Pope's style had raised up innumerable imitators 
until " every warbler ' ; had the master's "tune by heart." * 
The success of these early poems was sufficient to en- 
courage Cowper to continue his labours, and in 1785 he 
published The Task, the greatest of his longer 
poems. The Task was written at the suggestion 
of Cowper's cheerful and witty friend Lady Austen, who 
had urged him to try his hand at blank verse. Cowper 
was at a loss for a subject, and Lady Austen, anxious that 
he should make a start, said, "Oh! you can write upon any- 
thing — write upon this sofa." Lady Austen was right. 
The important thing was to get Cowper fairly at work; his 
genius needed this external incentive, and the poem begun 
as a task soon became a pleasure. Once over the initial 
difficulties, he poured out in rambling, inconsequent, but 
charming verse, those nice observations of life and nature 
that he had accumulated in years of quiet and contempla- 
tion. For The Task, deficient as it seems in definite plan or 
structure, has yet an artistic unity, because, from first to 
last, it is a revelation of Cowper himself. The group about 
the fire on a winter's night; the woodsman, crossing the snow 
to his day's work, his lean cur at his heels, or frolicking 
in the powdery drift; the waggoner, breasting the driv- 
ing storm beside his reeking team; the quiet return of even- 

1 Table Talk, q. v. %>assim for an expression of Cowper's views on 
this subject. 



442 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

ing; the still waters of the Ouse, shining like "molten-glass" 
in the green fields; the square church-tower; the dipt hedge- 
rows, and all the ordered beauty and repose of the English 
landscape; — these things Cowper had seen and loved, and 
his simple, faithful descriptions of them are entirely free 
from self-consciousness or artifice. 1 And side by side with 
these idylls of an English village, are the poet's thoughts 
on life in its wider aspects; on the special problems that the 
men of his generation were then but just begimiing to per- 
ceive. Recluse as he was, timid as he seems, he was a 
leader, a precursor of Wordsworth, a man who helped to 
bring in the ideals of our modern world. He was the poet 
of that awakened religious fervour which was then cleansing 
and uplifting society; the poet of the new love for 
humanity, that rose above the artificial barriers of nation 
or of class: 

"My ear is pained, 
My soul is sick with every day's report 
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. 
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart ; 
It does not feel for man." 2 

He is the lover of human freedom, the champion of the 
slave; the poet of the simple, natural life, who declared that 

"God made the country, and man made the town." 

His heart goes out to the helpless and the weak; to all liv- 
ing things. Even the worm seems to him to have his rights 
in the world. 3 The Task established Cowper s fame, and 
Southey has pronounced him "the most popular poet of 
his generation." After its publication he devoted himself 

1 He says truly in The Task, addressing Mrs. Unwin: 

"Thou knowest my praise of Nature most sincere, 
And that my raptures are not conjured up 
To serve occasions of poetic pomp, 
But genuine, and art partner of them all." 

— Book II. 

» The Task, Bk. ii. 1-5. ' The Task, Bk. vi. 



COWPER. 443 

systematically to literary work. He made a translation of 
Homer, and wrote some of the best of his shorter pieces, 
but completed no other long or great poem. But his life 
was a tragedy. In his last years the darkness closed over 
him, and in 1796, after the illness and death of Mrs. Unwin, 
his mental condition became pitiable in the extreme. He 
could struggle no longer. He believed himself beyond the 
reach of mercy, and his poem of The Castaway, written 
during these last despairing years, is the cry of one 
who is sinking forever into a black abyss. He died in 
1800, and "never," said Southey, "was there a burial at 
which the mourners might, with more sincerity of feeling, 
give their hearty thanks to Almighty God, that it had 
pleased him to deliver the departed out of the miseries of 
this sinful world." 

While he could not entirely rid himself of the worn-out 
conventionalities and the prosaic spirit of the older school. 
Cowper's poetry possesses certain great and obvious merits. 
It is great because it expresses with absolute truthfulness, 
and simplicity of feeling, an essentially noble and loving 
disposition, and because it records with a delicate exact- 
ness the results of a close observation of nature and of men. 
His imagination does not carry him beyond the limits of 
his own experience; he cannot enter into and reveal to us 
the souls of other men ; but he reveals his own, and (as his 
friend Hayley said of him) 

"His virtues formed the magic of his song," 

If he is limited, he is genuine. It is the unmistakable 
accent of truth in his Lines on My Mother's Picture, that 
makes it one of the most heart-breaking poems in literature. 
It is not the skill of the poet which impresses us, but the 
grief of a man. We feel this unmistakable accent of truth 
in the poem To Mary, in The Castaway, and in his finely 
etched pictures of country-life. And to sincerity, we must 



444 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

add simplicity, that final virtue which the most finished 
artists sometimes fail to attain. The power of Cowper's 
poem On the Loss of the Royal George is chiefly due to its 
restraint and directness, to its inspired simplicity. And 
besides these qualities, Cowper was gifted with a sense of 
humour, so quick, so playful, and so free from malice, that 
it only helped to bring him into closer and more human 
relations with the world. Cowper's letters are among the 
treasures of the literature, and are worthy to hold a place 
beside his verse. "Two men of mark in English literature, 
Southey and Alexander Smith, have called Cowper 'the 
best of English letter- writers/ and few will be found to 
challenge this opinion." * 

Loving and lovable, with all his weakness, it was given 
to him to see and to understand, through the power of 
sympathy, and through a kindly humour, and to tell the 
world truthfully and simply, and often with a peculiar, 
unobtrusive charm, the things he saw. 

ROBERT BURNS. 

(1759-1796.) 

The soul of the new England, its moving tenderness, 
its breadth of charity, its deepening notes of lyric passion, 
throb in the songs of the Scotch ploughman, Robert Burns. 
The lives and struggles of the mass of men that toiled and 
died about him were utterly outside the range of Pope's 
narrow sympathies and understanding; his genius lights 
up for us only that fashionable, frivolous, or literary 
world in which he moved, leaving all without in darkness. 
The scholarly Gray had written of the poor with refine- 
ment and taste, surrounding them with a certain poetic 
halo; but Burns spoke not about, but for them, by his 
birthright and his heritage of poverty and labour. The 

1 R. W. Benham, "Introduction" to Letters of William Cowper. 



BURNS. 445 

young democracy hurrying on the day through the labours 
of Brindley, the mechanic; Hargraves, the poor weaver; 
or Watt, the mathematical instrument maker's appren- 
tice, finds its poet-prophet in a farmer's boy of the Scotch 
Lowlands. The natural music, the irresistible melody of 
Burns 's songs, was learned not from the principles of 
literary lawgivers, but from the songs of the people. In 
their captivating lilt, their rich humour, their note of 
elemental passion, is revealed the soul of the peasant 
class. " Poetry," wrote the great poet who preached a 
little later the superiority of inspiration to artifice, " poetry 
comes from the heart and goes to the heart." x This is 
eminently true of the poetry of Burns, whose best songs 
have that heartfelt and broadly human quality which 
penetrates where more cultured verse fails to enter, and 
which outlasts the most elaborate productions of a less 
instinctive art. Burns himself assures us: 

"The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her, 
Till by himsel' he learned to wander, 
Adown some trotting burn's meander, 

An' no think lang: 
O sweet, to stray an' pensive ponder 

A heart-felt sang." 2 

Born out of his own experience, Burns's poems are racy 
of the soil, as frankly local in subject as in dialect. He 
is not ashamed to paint the homely and every-day aspects 
of the life about him, and he does this with a boldness 
and freedom which mark genius of an independent and 
original power. "The rough scenes of Scottish life, not 
seen by him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude 
contradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, 
are still lovely to him . . . and thus over the lowest prov- 
inces of man's existence he pours the glory of his own 

1 William Wordsworth. * " To William Simpson." 



446 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 



soul." 1 The family group,, after their week of toil, 

gathered in patriarchal simplicity about the cotter's 
hearthstone: the blazing ingle of the country tavern, 
where the drunken cronies, "victorious o'er aU ills,"' sing 
their jolly catches, oblivious of the storm without, or the 
wrathful wife at home: the current controversy between 
the Auld and Xew Lichts in the kirk: a wounded hare, or 
a flock of startled water-fowl, — such are the homely ma- 
terials ready to his hand, from which his poems are fash- 
ioned. We find in them that high gift which cannot be 
gained by a study of any Art of Poetry, of seeing with a 
fresh and penetrating insight. For while in one sense 
Burns'.: poems are local, they are none the less for all the 
world, so instinctively does he fasten upon those features 
of the life about him which best reflect in httle some general 
human experience, and so appeal to the common heart of 
mankind. The spirit of Tarn o' Shanter. defying care 
and the morrow, is the spirit of Sir Toby in Twelfth Night, 
rousing 

"the night-owl with a catch." 

Set to a more heroic key, it is that of Antony when he 

exclaims, while the sword hangs over him; 



"Come, 

Let's have one other gaudy night: call to me 
All my sail captains; fill our bowls once more. 
Let's mock the midnightben. M 2 

.And more, what is this but an expression of that im- 
perative desire to snatch the present joy which, in greater 
or smaller measure, is in us all. The poet who can look 
through, the vesture in which life clothes itself, and 
find beneath the abiding human significance, who can 
enter into and immortalise those elements of pleasure. 

1 Carlyle. "Essay on Burns." 

2 Antony and Cleopatra, Act iii. Sc. 11. 



BURNS. 447 

pain, and passion which make the substratum of our 
human comedy, that poet has shown us the universal in 
the local. 

Robert Burns, the son of a small farmer in Ayrshire, 
was born January 25, 1759. His family were poor, so 
that Burns could get but little regular education, and he 
remained "a hard-worked ploughboy." Through all his 
labour he was a great reader, having a ballad-book before 
him at meal-times, and whistling the songs of Scotland 
while guiding the plough. On the death of his father in 
1784, Robert and his brother and sisters took a farm 
together, but it proved unprofitable. By this time he had 
written numerous songs, and had gained by them con- 
siderable local reputation. His affairs were so involved 
that he thought of leaving the country, but changed his 
mind on receiving an invitation from a Dr. Blacklock, 
who had heard of his poetical ability, to visit Edinburgh. 
At Edinburgh, Burns, with his genius and flavour of 
rusticity, his massive head and glowing eyes, became 
the reigning sensation. In 1788 he leased a farm in Dum- 
friesshire, married Jean Armour, and spent one of his few 
peaceful and happy years. In 1789 he was appointed 
exciseman, that is, the district inspector of goods liable 
to a tax. From this time the habit of intemperance gained 
on him. His health and spirits failed, and bouts of reck- 
less drinking were followed by intervals of remorse and 
attempted recovery. His genius did not desert him, and 
some of his best songs were composed during this mis- 
erable time. He died July 21, 1796, worn out and pre- 
maturely old at thirty-seven, one of the great song-writers 
of the world. 

In spite of those weaknesses which cut off a life "that 
might have grown full straight," Burns's poetry is unmis- 
takably the utterance of a sincere, large-hearted, and 
essentially noble nature, pleasure-loving and full of 



448 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

laughter as a child, yet broken by a man's grief; a nature 
with more than a woman's tenderness, and with the poet's 
soul quivering at the throb of pain. 

"Still thou art blest, compared wf me, 
The present only toucheth thee ; 
But och ! I backward cast my e'e 

On prospects drear I 
An' forward, tho' I canna see, 
I guess and fear." 

Here in the midst of the lingering affectations of the 
time vibrates the anguish of Burns 's lyrical cry, quivering 
with the unmistakable accent of human suffering. This 
is the universal language of passion not to be learned in 
the schools. Hence Burns's love-songs, from the impas- 
sioned lyric flow of My Lure is Like a Red, Red Rose, 
or 0, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, to the quiet anguish 
of Ae Fond Kiss and then We Sever, or the serene beauty 
of To Mary in Heaven, are among the truest and best in 
the language. 

In The Cotter's Saturday Xight. as we enter the dwelling 
and identify ourselves with the daily life of the poor, 
we feel for ourselves that touch of brotherhood which 
in other poems it is Burns's mission to directly declare. 
Never perhaps since Langland's Piers Plowman has the 
complaint of the poor found such articulate expression: 

"See yonder poor, o'erlaboured wight, 
So abject, mean, and vile, 
Who begs a brother of the earth 
To give him leave to toil; 
And see his lordly fellow-worm 
The poor petition spurn, 
Unmindful though a weeping wife 
And helpless offspring mourn." 

When Burns wrote that — 

"Man's inhumanity to man 
Makes countless thousands mourn," 



BURNS. ' 449 

he expressed what thousands were coming to feel; when 
he wrote — 

"A king can make a belted knight, 
A marquis, duke, and a' that ; 
But an honest man's aboon his might, 
Guid faith he maunna fa' that, 

For a' that, and a' that, 

Their dignities and a' that, 
The pith o' sense and pride o* worth 

Are higher ranks than a' that," 

he gave to the world the greatest declaration in poetry 
of human equality and the glory of simple manhood. 
But, like that of Cowper, Burns's comprehensive sympathy 
reaches beyond the circle of human life. He stands at 
the furrow to look at the "tim'rous" field-mouse, whose 
tiny house his plough has laid in ruins, and his soul is broad 
enough to think of the trembling creature gently and 
humbly as his 

"Poor earth-born companion 
An' fellow-mortal." 

Like Byron, he was a poet of the revolution, but he dis- 
tinguished more clearly than Byron, between the shams 
and conventionalities which he attacks, and that which 
was enduring and worthy of reverence. Merciless and 
daring in his satire upon the cant and hypocrisy of those 
who, as he thought, used religion as a cloak for wickedness, 
he had himself a deeply reverential and religious nature 
which never confused the abuse of the thing with the 
thing abused. He is the poet of Nature as well as of man; 
he would make the streams and burnies of Scotland shine 
in verse with the Ilissus and the Tiber, and 

"Sing Auld Coila's plains and fells;" 

and finally in his stirring songs of Bannockburn he is the 
poet of patriotic Scotland. "Lowland Scotland," it has 



450 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

been said, " came in with her warriors and went out 
with her bards. It came in with William Wallace and 
Robert Bruce, and went out with Robert Burns and Walter 
Scott. The first two made the history; the last two told 
the story and sung the song." 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 
(1770-1850.) 

Toward the close of the eighteenth century we reach, in 
the French Revolution, the most stormy and critical pe- 
riod in the history of modern Europe. Toward this con- 
summation Europe had been rapidly moving. Poet and 
philosopher had gone before it, while to the toiling masses, 
starved, overtaxed, oppressed, the burden was becoming 
intolerable. Now, during the early acts of that terrible 
drama, the cloud-land visions and lofty speculations of poet 
and philosopher, looking for the coming of a Golden Age 
of peace and brotherhood, seemed to many to be passing 
out of the region of speculation into the world of substantial 
fact. Cowper in The Task had cried out against the Bas- 
tiie as a shameful u house of bondage:" 1 four years later it 
fell before the fury of a Parisian mob (1789). Then 

" France her giant limbs upreared, 
And with that oath which smote earth, air, and sea, 
Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free." 2 

Europe looked on breathless, as the. whole glittering fabric 
of French feudalism, rotten at the base, suddenly crashed 
into ruin. The ancient barriers of custom and authority 
were swept away as. in a night; the floods were out; the 
Revolution begun. Blake walked the streets of London 
wearing the red cockade of the Revolutionists, and the pas- 

1 The Task, Bk. v. V. the whole passage. 

2 Coleridge, France, an Ode. 



WORDSWORTH. 451 

sionate hopes for the future of the race broadened far be- 
yond the old national limits, to embrace the whole family 
of man. Even the great statesman Pitt sympathised with 
the Revolutionists, and Fox is said to have exclaimed, on 
hearing of the destruction of the Bastile, "How much is 
this the greatest event that ever happened in the world, 
and how much the best!" Edmund Burke, indeed, stood 
aloof from the rest, a solitary and impregnable tower of 
conservatism; and in Edinburgh the young Walter Scott, 
whose intense sympathy with that chivalric past was to 
revive its glories in the pages of poetry and romance, looked 
on at the fury of demolition with characteristic disapproval. 
But for the most part the hopes of youth, and of all the 
ardent and enthusiastic spirits of the time, went out to- 
ward the Revolutionists in a great torrent of exultation. 
The imagination of the youthful poets William Words- 
worth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, all 
in the impressionable years of opening manhood when the 
Revolution began, was fired by the idea that the world was 
being made anew. They trod the earth in rapture, their 
eyes fixed upon a vision of the dawn. Looking back upon 
this time one of their number wrote: 

"Bliss was it in that Dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven." l 

A spirit of change was in the air which showed itself in 
many ways. In England it expressed itself in a more pos- 
itive reaction against much that was hollow and artificial 
in the life and literature of an earlier time. The longing 
for something natural and genuine became the master pas- 
sion of the new leaders of thought. Not only does the new 
love of Nature and of man inspire the poetry of Wordsworth 
and of Coleridge, they are the leaders of a deliberate attack 

1 Wordsworth, The Prelude, Bk. xi. 



452 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

on the artificial poetic manner exemplified in the poetry of 
Pope. Wordsworth came determined to destroy the old 
"poetic diction" and set up a simpler and truer manner in 
its stead. Another but later expression of this longing for 
what is genuine is found in the works of the great prose- 
writer Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), who fiercely denounced 
all "shams," railed against the eighteenth century as an 
era of fraud and unbelief, and preached that men "should 
come back to reality, that they should stand upon things 
and not upon the shows of things." In these, and in many 
similar ways, the period at which we have now arrived was 
an era of revolution. In many spheres of thought and ac- 
tion the old order was changing, yielding place to new. 

William Wordsworth, one of the great leaders in this era 
of change, was born April 7, 1770, at Cockermouth, a little 

village on the river Derwent in the county of 
Wordsworth. Cumberland. His father, the law-agent to Sir 

James Lowther, was descended from an ancient 
family of Yorkshire landowners, while his mother's ancestors 
had been among the landed gentry of Cumberland since the 
reign of Edward III. On both sides, therefore, the poet 
came of a family stock deeply rooted in the country soil, 
and he may well have inherited from this long line of pro- 
vincial ancestors that sympathy with the country, and with 
the simple incidents of country life, which is a principal 
element in his verse. Cumberland, a singularly lovely re- 
gion of lake and mountain, was then far more remote than 
at present from the activities of the outside world. Words- 
worth was gifted with a wonderful susceptibility to natural 
beauty, and the serenity and grandeur of his early sur- 
roundings entered deep into his life to become the very 
breath of his being. In his daily companionship with Na- 
ture he seems to have felt at first a kind of primitive and 
unreasoning rapture, to be changed in later years for a more 
profound and conscious love. His more regular education 



WORDSWORTH. 453 

was obtained at Hawkshead School, in Lancashire, and at 
Cambridge. But college and the fixed routine of college 
studies failed to touch his enthusiasm, and he is said to 
have occupied himself before coming up for his degree in 
reading Richardson's novels. He graduated in 1791, but, 
as may be supposed, without having distinguished himself. 
On leaving Cambridge he spent some months in visiting 
London and elsewhere, finally crossing to France, where 
he caught the contagion of republicanism, and was on the 
point of offering himself as a leader of the Girondist party. 
His relations, alarmed for his safety, stopped his supplies, 
and in 17§2 lack of money compelled his return. On reach- 
ing England he found himself with no profession and with- 
out definite prospects. After three years in this unsettled 
condition he was unexpectedly placed beyond actual want 
by a timely legacy of £900 from his friend Raisley Calvert, 
who had discerned in Wordsworth the promise of future 
greatness, and who wished to make him free to pursue his 
chosen career. Shortly before this he had made his first 
public ventures in poetry (An Evening Walk, 1793; De- 
scriptive Sketches, 1793). After the receipt of Calvert's 
legacy he took a cottage at Racedown in Dorsetshire with 
his devoted sister Dorothy, resolved to dedicate himself to 
poetry. From this time Wordsworth's life was of the most 
studiously simple, severe, and uneventful description, an 
example of that " plain living and high thinking" in which 
he believed. It was lived close to nature, in the circle of 
deep home attachments, and in the society of a few chosen 
friends, but it resembled that of Milton in its solemn con- 
secration to the high service of his art, and in its consistent 
nobility and loftiness of tone. Leaving Racedown in 1797, 
Wordsworth settled at Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey, Som- 
ersetshire, where his genius rapidly developed under the 
stimulating companionship of his friend Coleridge. Here 
the two poets worked together, and in 1798 published the 



454 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems to which each con- 
tributed. This work, by its deliberate departure from the 
outworn poetic manner, marks an era in the history of 
English poetry It is in his preface to the second edition 
of this work (published 1800) that Wordsworth made his 
famous onslaught upon the school of Pope, declaring, among 
other things, that poetry was not to be made by rules, but 
that it was "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." 
After this Wordsworth worked steadily, holding to his 
own notions of poetry in spite of the ridicule of the critics 
and the neglect of the body of readers. In the winter of 
1798-1799 he visited Germany. On his return he settled 
in Westmoreland, in the Lake District, living first at Gras- 
mere (1799-1813), and finally removing to Rydal Mount. 
In 1802 he married his cousin Mary Hutchinson, also a 
native of Cumberland. Miss Hutchinson, like Words- 
worth's beloved sister Dorothy, had a rare appreciation of 
poetry. He had thus the devotion and sympathy of two 
gifted women, t>oth capable of entering into his finest emo- 
tions and aspirations. The poet, his wife, and sister, thus 
lived in an ideal and beautiful companionship, unfortu- 
nately but too rare in the lives of men of genius. Words- 
worth's remaining years were passed at Rydal Mount, 
except when his trana A uil existence was broken by short 
journeys on the Continent or elsewhere. As he advanced 
in life his work won its way in the public favour. He was 
made Poet Laureate in 1843, and died peacefully April 23, 
1850, as his favourite clock struck the hour of noon. 

As a poet Wordsworth was surpassingly great within 
that somewhat restricted sphere which he has made 

peculiarly his own. He is deficient in a sense 
as °a poet* °f humour, he possesses but little dramatic 

force or narrative skill, and he fails in a broad 
and living sympathy with the diverse passions and interests 
of human life. These limitations will always tend to make 



WORDSWORTH. 455 

him the poet of the appreciative few. To him, indeed, 
his own words are strikingly applicable: 

"He is retired as noontide dew, 

Or fountain in a noonday grove; 
And you must love him, ere to you 
He will seem worthy of your love." ! 

Yet he is as truly the poet of the mysterious world we 
call Nature, as Shakespeare is the poet of the life of man. 
He, more than all other poets, teaches us to enter into that 
world and find in it the very temple of God, in which and 
through which He himself will draw close to us. 

For Wordsworth's mystical rapture in the presence 
of the living world is very different from a merely sensuous 
or aesthetic delight; it is, in his highest moods, a profoundly 
religious emotion. In the intensity of his contemplation, 
his own being is lost in the flood of universal life "that 
rolls through all things," and in an ecstasy of aspiration 
he is "laid asleep in body and becomes a living soul." 2 
Such a mood, unintelligible to more phlegmatic and 
commonplace natures, is characteristic of those in whom 
the apprehension of ideal or spiritual things is exceptionally 
strong. Plato or Plotinus, the passive Brahmin of the 
East, or the German Tender, seeks, each in his own fashion, 
to erect himself above himself by an ecstasy of thought or 
emotion. "By ecstasy," said Plotinus, "the soul becomes 
loosened from its material prison, separated from individ- 
ual consciousness, and becomes absorbed into the 
Infinite Intelligence from which it emanated." Now to 
Wordsworth the path of escape from the "material prison," 
the avenue of access to the "Infinite Intelligence," lay 
through communion with the informing life in Nature. 
His assurance that the universe was not a mechanical 
contrivance, like a huge piece of clockwork, whose motive 

1 A Poet's Epitaph. 

7 Lines on Revisiting Tintern Abbey, 



456 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

power was law, but a something divinely alive, is the 
basis alike of his poetry and his philosophy. This seem- 
ingly stolid countryman, with somewhat the aspect of a 
benignant farmer, recognises the presence of a sentient 
life in brook and flower, with the poetic apprehension of 
the Greek in the dewy morning of the world. He teaches 
that if we will but pause in our perpetual quest, and let 
Nature work her will on us, active influences, at work 
within her, will go out to us. 

"Nor less I deem that there are Powers, 
Which of themselves our minds impress; 
That we can feed this mind of ours 
In a wise passiveness." l 

In accord with this, is Wordsworth's reiterated teach- 
ing that Nature, and the deep joy in Nature, is, or should 
be, the great formative influence in the life of man. If 
in youth man lies on the lap of his great Earth-Mother, 
something passes into his life which later experience, and 
the worldliness which may come with years, can never 
"utterly abolish or destroy." 2 It seemed to Words- 
worth that the secret of life was to hold fast youth's 
generous emotions, its high imaginings, its deep fountains 
of joy, as an antidote to the deadening and contaminating 
influences of the world. He believed that it was by a 
consistent fellowship with Nature that this precious con- 
servation of our high ei potions could best be accomplished. 
To see again in age sor^e aspect of Nature which sank deep 
into the soul in youth; to hear again in age that cry of the 
cuckoo which enchanted us in boyhood, is to revive our 
youthful rapture, and " beget that golden time again." 3 
Thus a "natural piety," binding our days each to each, 4 
should inoculate us against the contagion of the world. 

1 Expostulation and Reply. 2 Ode on Intimations of Immortality. 

' Lines to the Cuckoo. 4 The Rainbow. 



WORDSWORTH. 457 

Wordsworth celebrates the beauty, harmony, and 
sublimity of Nature; he is fortified by its calm and its 
Limitations of unDr °ken order; sustained with eternal hopes 
Wordsworth's by the unwearied renewal of the vernal earth, 

view of Nature. by the - cneerfu l f aith » tnat « all which we 

behold is full of blessings." 1 But Nature is not all a May 
day; she has a harsh and terrifying side, of which Words- 
worth was apparently oblivious. He is silent as to her 
mysterious discords of pain, cruelty, and death. So far 
as we can tell, he is unimpressed by any feeling of her 
magnificent indifference to man. To this extent his poetry 
of Nature is partial and incomplete. Nevertheless, in this 
very incompleteness lies one source of Wordsworth's 
tranquillising and uplifting power. We are refreshed and 
sanctified by the very unreservedness of his conviction that 
the whole world is but the temple of the living God. Of 
all the poets who in the eighteenth century came to lead 
a rouged and tired generation of intrigue and scandal 
back to that mother-world to which they had become as 
strangers, Wordsworth proved himself the greatest and 
most inspired guide. The murmur of the Derwent, 2 the 
clouds gathered about the setting sun, the splendours of 
lonely dawns, the solitude of mountain-peak and lake and 
forest, all these things had been his world, and consciously 
and unconsciously the amplitude and sublimity of that 
world, extending inimitably about us in its large patience 
and inscrutable repose, possessed and enlarged his soul. 
His life rises to the dignity of a great example, because it 
is so outwardly ordinary and so inwardly exceptional; 
because he showed us how to make a new use of those 
familiar sources of joy and comfort which lie open to all 
who have eyes to see and ears to hear. His life was 
severely simple, yet the world was his, even as, up to the 
measure of our power of receiving, we may make it ours. 
1 Lines on Revisiting T intern Abbey. ? V. The Prelude. 



458 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

It is this serene and noble simplicity of Wordsworth's 
life and character that sheds over certain of his poems an 
indescribable and altogether incomparable charm. Such 
short lyrics as The Solitary Reaper, the poems to 
Lucy, or The Primrose of the Rock, are filled with 
that characteristic and magical excellence which refuses 
to be analysed or defined. Wordsworth's sonnets are 
among the best in the literature; and his longer poems, 
such as The Excursion, while deficient in compactness and 
structure, are illumined by passages of wonderful wisdom 
and beauty. At times, as in those characteristic master- 
pieces, the great companion odes To Duty and On 
the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early 
Childhood, his verse has an elevation and a large majesty 
of utterance unheard in English poetry since the deep- 
throated harmonies of Milton. In spite of frequent lapses, 
Wordsworth's poetic art is of a very high order, and 
places him with the greatest poets of England. 

In a very real sense Wordsworth is the poet of the new 
democracy, as he is of the new love of Nature. The chosen 

characters of his poems are the simple and hardy 
dmo P cracy. f P easants of nis native Cumberland. Like the 

good Lord Clifford, in the Song at the Feast 
of Brougham Castle, he found love in "huts where poor 
men lie." Once it was a canon of literary art that the 
shepherd-hero should prove to be a prince in disguise, or 
the charming shepherdess, like Perdita, the lost daughter 
of a queen. But Wordsworth, speaking for a world that 
has outworn its feudalism, discards all such adventitious 
and once necessary means of enlisting our sympathy. 
"The man's the gowd for a' that," and it is the deep 
democratic feeling to which we have now grown so accus- 
tomed in our modern literature that gives the sorrows of 
Margaret or of the old shepherd Michael an equal place in 
the world's heart with the most royal of sufferers, recog- 



COLERIDGE. 459 

nising in the humblest a common humanity consecrated 
by the dignity of a great grief. 

Matthew Arnold, himself a poetic disciple of Words- 
worth, has thus summed up the peculiar greatness of his 
master's work: " Wordsworth's poetry is great because 
of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels 
the joy offered to us in Nature, the joy offered to us in the 
simple primary affections and duties; and because of 
the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, 
he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us 
share it. " * 

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 

(1772-1834.) 

Wordsworth lived out his long, blameless, and devoted 
life under conditions singularly favourable to the full de- 
velopment of his genius. Freed from the pressure of money 
difficulties, and enabled to live simply amid the loveliest 
of natural surroundings, happy in his home and in his 
friends, and blessed with health and energy, he has left us 
a shining example of a serene and truly successful life. 
The story of Coleridge, Wordsworth's friend and fellow- 
poet, is tragically different. It is the story of a man of 
rare and varied gifts, who, from whatever cause, could not, 
or did not, put forth his powers to the full. Carlyle has 
condensed this into one epigrammatic sentence: "To the 
man himself had Nature given, in high measure, the seeds 
of a noble endowment; and to unfold it had been forbidden 
him." 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest of a large family, 
was the son of the vicar and schoolmaster at the little town 
of Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. Left an orphan in his 
ninth year, he was admitted to the Charity School at Christ's 

1 Introduction to Selections from Wordsworth. 



460 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

Hospital, London, and began the unequal fight of life. 
Here he met Charles Lamb, who has recorded some of their 
joint experiences in one of his Essays of Elia. 1 From the 
first, Coleridge seems to have half lived in a dream-world, 
created by "the shaping spirit of Imagination/ ' which, as 
he says, "Nature gave me at my birth." 2 As a little child 
he wandered over the Devonshire fields, slashing the tops 
off weeds and nettles in the character of one of the "Seven 
Champions of Christendom;" and in school at London he 
would lie for hours on the roof, gazing after the drifting 
clouds while his schoolfellows played football in the court 
below; or in the midst of the crowded Strand, he would 
fancy himself Leander swimming the Hellespont. A hope- 
lessly erratic, inconsequent element runs through his whole 
life, depriving it of unity and steady purpose. At nineteen 
he went to Cambridge and furnished his rooms with no 
thought of his inability to pay the upholsterers; then, under 
the pressure of a comparatively trifling debt, he gave up 
all his prospects, fled to London, and enlisted in the Dra- 
goons. He returned to Cambridge, but left there in 1794 
without taking a degree. Visiting Oxford in this year, he 
met the youthful Southey, in whom he found a kindred 
spirit. Both were feeling that impulse from the French 
Revolution which was agitating Europe. They agreed that 
human society should be reconstructed, and decided to 
begin the reform by establishing an ideal community in the 
wilds of America. The new form of government was to be 
called a Pantisocracy, or the government by all, and the 
citizens were to combine farming and literature. The bent 
of the two poets at this time is shown by the subjects of 
their work. They composed together a poem on The Fall 
of Robespierre, and Southey's Wat Tyler (1794) is charged 
with the revolutionary spirit. In 1795 Coleridge married 

1 Christ's Hospital, Five-and-Thirty Years Ago. 

2 Coleridge's Dejection ; an Ode. 



COLERIDGE. 461 

Sarah Fricker, whose sister Edith became the wife of 
Southey a few weeks later. The pantisocratic scheme was 
given up for lack of funds, and Coleridge and his wife set- 
tled at Clevedon, on the Bristol Channel. It was about 
two years after this that he met Wordsworth at Alfoxden, 
contributing The Ancient Mariner to their joint venture, 
the Lyrical Ballads. In 1798 Coleridge left for Germany, 
where he remained about two years, receiving a fresh and 
powerful stimulus from the new intellectual and literary 
life on which that nation had just entered. An immedi- 
ate result of the visit was a translation of Schiller's Wallen- 
stein, but its effect on Coleridge's tone of thought was 
profound and lasting. Through him, and afterward 
through Thomas Carlyle, the influence of German literature 
began for the first time to tell on that of England. 

Coleridge returned to England in 1800. He gave up an 
excellent opening in journalism to lead a life of quietness 
and study, settling near Keswick, in Cumberland, a district 
to which his friend Wordsworth had already retreated. 
Here he was full of great plans; life seemed growing easier; 
but his work was interrupted by illness, and to quiet the 
torments of gout and neuralgia, he unhappily resorted to a 
quack specific containing opium. 

He thus gradually came under the power of this terrible 
drug, and for the next fifteen years he battled with a habit 
which was clouding his splendid intellect, and benumbing 
his energies and his will. To follow this melancholy story 
is like watching the efforts of some hurt creature struggling 
in the toils. Estranged from his family, he became, as he 
writes, "the most miserable of men, having a home, and 
yet homeless." Finally, under the care of a Mr. Gilman, a 
surgeon, at Highgate, London, he conquered his fatal habit. 

Carlyle, who visited him at Mr. Gilman's, says that he 
"gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings, 
a life heavy laden, half vanquished, still swimming pain- 



46: 



?.>z :i ::;:ii:~ l: 



ttre. 



fully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment.' " * 

On:e. ~LL :Le sense :: ::e~e: n;n n.LL. Lin. Le La :; 
!•:■■: Lei ::m\::i :•: :Le : :n: : sL: ::: :f sine ninL.7 ~zz£S 

-\-..\- n;L . : 't :;.." :t/' express Lis nines' n:~ ™L". ; : 
ne:L ve: n::if. Le ~s,s Lenen mi LsLennenei :Lei 
' t Lie Ln^ zz'-' : r -::r LinseL mi :Le ~:rii. His LeL;:: 
was sLn:e:e:L Lis ~iL weaLenei. ~LLe iLe se: 

-—Lei Lin :.'.:~ n. In :ir :: Lis nee: •;: : en: 



sense :: ::n:es: n nnn tne 


rne.m ;: : n: :s e.nn::. 


Azd ~:\iid -•:■- Ir-im :ir stx 


:zzil:: It. 


S'iLl :: eens ::rLn is L: ; e: 
~.;ri= :: :r:::eisn ILnL : i 


e: Lin eLar. ;n" in~ris:~re 
_-!:-; is e~en n:re LemeLLL 


ire Ls :•'::::; L :: e.essness .~e_e 
L :i: i~i:L".v:i •: : -i ies: ventL. 


-Le nnLes ::' ::,= nn-nLLn 


"TMs feceadsir g h : use o : 
ILis bod" :-ii: i:e= ~r 

: er a-v rliirs i^d giir: 
H:— iigiin :le- :: z-ls.. 
Zy::i: :;:ii. T.Li: ':: :«dv 
W1-- -:u:h snd I L^L; 


led ling — 


V : - wLen 'n: L:pe is." 






life's 3 -irning 


- : '-- : :z --7 &r?*& :■: n 


±L" ~~ s^-- v = 


_ I'-i": :n:v 5t:~t5 * : z 


.iZr -1: ;r.f"'r 


_: ..:t E-zzie : : :: "-L^- 


~el:~i z-ir.. 


Ye: v~l lll .:.;',' ■-. 


is - f :.-.;zie ^lile 



; c, ::-;-:, = 



COLERIDGE. 463 

Hopeless as the sadness of this poem is, it is yet the sad- 
ness of a tranquil and quiet acceptance of a great loss. In 
nothing is the real sweetness and soundness of this man's 
nature more manifest than in the absence of all taint of 
bitterness, of peevish complaint or Byronic despair. What 
he deems his own failure does not prevent his genuine 
delight in Wordsworth's great achievements. And when 
at last — as in one of his own poems — Hope and Love, 
overtasked, at length give way, their mute sister, Patience, 

"Both supporting, does the work of both." * 

When Coleridge wrote his words of regret for the youth 
and life that seemed to have slipped away from him so 
fast, the corruptible body was already pressing heavily on 
the mind that mused upon so many things. Four years 
later, on July 25, 1834, he was delivered from the burden 
of the flesh. The world had let him die in his conviction 
of failure, but no sooner had the grave closed over him than 
England resounded with his praise. 

If Wordsworth's was a life lived out in the still, high 
altitudes of thought, if it was heroic in its simplicity and 
austerity, it has in it a certain chill that seems to come 
from its very loftiness and isolation. But Coleridge, with 
his rare and lovely nature, is perpetually hurting himself 
against the rough places of an uncompromising world. 
He is struggling all his life with the crowd, stumbling, and 
beaten, and disheartened, and by the mysterious law of 
human suffering, he gains a tenderness that we miss in 
Wordsworth in spite of all his successes. If Wordsworth 
has the stimulating vigour of the stoic, Coleridge has the 
great compassion of the Christian. 

For in spite of his inward conviction that he had failed, 
there is, especially in his later poems, the stillness of a 
great calm. In Henry Crabbe Robinson's Diary there is 

1 Love, Hope and Patience in Education. 



464 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

this significant passage: "Last night he [Coleridge] con- 
cluded his fine development of the Prince of Denmark by 
an eloquent statement of the moral of the play. 'Action/ 
he said, ' is the great end of all; no intellect, however grand, 
is valuable, if it draw us from action and lead us to think 
and think till the time of action is passed by, and we can 
do nothing.' Somebody said to me, 'This is a satire on 
himself. 5 'No,' said I, 'it is an elegy.'" * 

Much of Coleridge's work is, like his life, fragmentary 
and incomplete; yet its range and variety bear witness to 

the broad scope and many-sided vigour of 
Coiendge's ^ g g en j us# jj e was one f the great English 

talkers. On every hand we find testimony to 
his personal influence upon his distinguished contemporaries. 
As a converser he held somewhat the same place as that 
occupied by Samuel Johnson immediately before, and by 
Thomas Babington Macaulay immediately after, him. 

In Coleridge's full life the writing of poetry was but 
one interest, .even perhaps a somewhat incidental one. 
mi i ^ s discursive energy spent itself in philosophy, 
pher and in theology, in political journalism, and in 
critic. criticism. He strove to infuse into the common- 

sense and materialistic English philosophy, the more ideal 
and spiritual character of contemporary German thought. 
He was the most profound and philosophic critic of his time. 
His Biographia Literaria contains an exposition of Words- 
worth's poetic principles even superior to that put forth 
by that poet himself. His lectures on Shakespeare began 
an era in the history of English Shakespearean criticism. 

Coleridge left but little poetry. Much of this is scrappy 
and unfinished, and no small proportion is obviously 

inferior in quality to his best poetic work. 

He seems to have required peculiar conditions 
for poetic composition; inspiration came to him suddenly, 

1 Diary, etc., of H. C. Robinson, vol. ii. p. 235. 



COLERIDGE. 465 

in mysterious gusts ; but often before a poem was finished, 
it as suddenly left him, apparently as powerless as an 
ordinary mortal to complete what he alone could have 
begun. Thus, after writing the second part of Christdbel, 
a poem born of the very breath of inspiration, he waited 
vainly until the end of his life for the return of the crea- 
tive mood. He tells us that when writing Kubla Khan, 
a poem which came to him in his sleep as a kind of 
vision, he was interrupted "by a person on business from 
Porlock," and that on his return he was unable to com- 
plete it. He concludes with the pathetically characteris- 
tic words: "The author has frequently purposed to finish 
for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to 
him. Avptov aSiov ao-w; but the to-morrow is yet to come." 

We should rather attribute the smallness and incom- 
pleteness of his poetic work to some defect of character 
or purpose, some outside limitation which clogged the 
free exercise of a great gift, than regard it as the result of 
any flaw in the quality of the gift itself. 

While in mere bulk his contribution to poetry is com- 
paratively small, its intrinsic value outweighs all the 
ponderous mass of poor Southey's laborious epics. When 
Coleridge's genius works freely and under favourable 
conditions, we are captivated by a music that places him 
with the lyrical masters of the literature, and impressed by 
the sense of his absolute originality of tone. His descrip- 
tions of Nature are often condensed and vivid, like those 
of Dante, showing the power to enter into the spirit of a 
scene and reproduce it with a few quick strokes : 

"The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out; 
At one stride comes the dark." 1 

In some poems, indeed, he seems to follow in the track 
of Wordsworth; but in Christabel, The Ancient Mariner, 

1 The Ancient Mariner,, 



466 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

and Kubla Khan, he stands alone. There have been many 
poets of the supernatural; but one province of the land of 
visions Coleridge rules as his demesne, and 

"Within that circle none durst walk but he." 1 

The Ancient Mariner is connected with that revival of in- 
terest in native ballad-poetry which was one phase of roman- 
ticism. Not only is it a ballad in form; it is filled 
Ma e riner! ent w * tn those ghostly and mysterious elements 
which, in a cruder shape, enter so largely into 
the folk-song and legend of primitive superstition. Such 
elements were congenial to certain writers of the romantic 
school, both in Germany and England, representing as 
they did the "Renaissance of Wonder," 2 the reaction 
against the matter-of-fact and rational spirit of the pre- 
ceding period. In both The Ancient Mariner and Christ- 
abel the ghostly and the horrible lose much of that gross 
and physical terror which the ordinary literature of super- 
stition is content with calling forth. Coleridge's more 
subtle art brings us into a twilight and debatable region 
which seems to hover between the unseen and the seen, 
the conjectural and the real. He invests us with nameless 
terrors, as when we fear to turn because of a fiendish 
something that treads behind. 

We are also to observe the skill with which this super- 
natural element is woven into a narrative of possible in- 
cidents, so realistically told as fully to persuade us of their 
truth. By such means Coleridge has carried out his pro- 
fessed object, and almost deluded us into a temporary 
belief in the whole story. 

Coleridge has thus created a new thing out of the crude 
materials of vulgar superstition, but in doing this he has 

1 Dryden, Prologue to the Tempest. 

1 The phrase of Theodore Watte-Duuton. 



COLERIDGE. 467 

employed other agencies than those already named. In 
The moral n ^ s shadowy world, as in that of Hawthorne, 
significance we are haunted by the continual suggestion 
e poem. o ^ some underlying moral significance. How far 
we should attempt to confine the spiritual suggestiveness of 
The Ancient Mariner within the limits of a set moral is open 
to question. To do this may seem to some like taking the 
poem out of its twilight atmosphere to drag it into the 
light of common day. Yet we can hardly fail to feel that 
Coleridge has here written for us the great poem of charity, 
that "ver}^ bond of peace and of all virtues" which should 
bind together all created things. It is against this law of 
love that the mariner sins. He wantonly kills a creature 
that has trusted him, that has loved him, that has par- 
taken of the sailors' food and come at their call. The 
necessary penalty for this breach in the fellowship of 
living things is an exclusion from that fellowship. His 
"soul" is condemned to dwell alone, until by his com* 
passion for the "happy living things" about the ship — 
by the renewal of that love against which he has sinned — 
he takes the first step toward his return into the great 
brotherhood of animate creation. For hate, or wanton 
cruelty, is the estranging power which, by an inevitable 
law, forces a man into spiritual exile, just as love is the 
uniting power which draws together all living things. 
The very power to pray depends upon our dwelling in this 
mystic fellowship of charity; and in the poem, praying 
and loving are constantly associated. (See verses 14 and 
15 in Part iv., also 22 and 23 in Part vii.) 

The underlying meaning in this becomes apparent in 
that verse which gives us the completest statement of the 
thought of the poem: 

"He prayeth best who loveth best 
All things both great and small; 
For the dear God who loveth us, 
He made and loveth alL" 



468 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

The last couplet gives us the reason for the declaration 
contained in the first. Not only is love the bond between 
all created things — it is the bond also between the Creator 
and his creatures. It is the mysterious, underlying prin- 
ciple of creation because it is the essence of its Creator, and 
an outcast through his violation of love here is no longer 
able to approach the Source of all love. For the loneliness 
of the mariner does not consist in his loss of human sym- 
pathy merely; he seems to drift on that strange sea of 
isolation almost beyond the power of the Universal Love: 

"So lonely 'twas that God himself 
Scarce seemed there to be." 

Looked at from this aspect, The Ancient Mariner be- 
comes the profoundest and perhaps most beautiful expres- 
sion of that feeling of sympathy for all living things which 
we have found uttering itself with increasing distinctness 
in later eighteenth-century literature. 

But Coleridge's place as a poet is far from resting entirely 
on his poems of the supernatural. Like Wordsworth, al- 
though not perhaps so instinctively and habitually, he sees 
in nature the outward manifestation of a divine energy, 
and God is the " all-conscious presence of the Universe." 
But he realises, as Wordsworth did not appear to do, that 
to each man nature is but what his mood or his power of 
spiritual apprehension makes her. To the dulled or jaun- 
diced eye the world is obscured or discoloured; we endow 
Nature with that joy which is within our own souls, or 
darken her fairest scenes with the pall of our sorrow, so 
that we receive from her " but what we give." 1 In the 
philosophical element of Coleridge's maturer poems we rec- 
ognise the influence of that idealistic thought of contem- 
porary Germany which was but the philosophic form of the 
rebound from the materialism of an earlier time. 

1 Dejection ; an Ode. For this view of Nature see this poem and con- 
trast it with Wordsworth's Expostulation and Reply. 



COLERIDGE. 469 

As he watched the promise of the French Revolution 
depart in the license and frenzy of the Reign of Terror, 
Coleridge, like Wordsworth and Southey, aban- 
matt. 6 doned his youthful hopes for a settled conserva- 

tism. Burke had written at the opening of the 
Revolution "that the effect of liberty to individuals is that 
they may do what they please ; we ought to see what it will 
please them to do before we risk congratulations which may 
be soon turned into complaints. " l Seven years later, dur- 
ing which he had looked on at the murderous riot of a nation 
from which all external forces of control had been suddenly 
withdrawn, Coleridge reaches in his "France" a similar 
conclusion. He sees that true liberty must rest upon obe- 
dience to a moral law, that the only foundation for the 
improvement of society is the improvement of the indi- 
vidual, without which a so-called liberty may but hand 
men over to the tyranny of evil habits and desires. 

"The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, 
Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game 
They burst their manacles and wear the name 
Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain! " 2 

In this conviction, that liberty is obedience to the 
highest, Coleridge is one with Wordsworth and with John 
Ruskin, the daring and impassioned social reformer of our 
own day. 

1 Burke, Reflections on French Revolution, 
8 Coleridge, France ; an Ode. 



470 RISE 07 MSDEKS LITERATURE. 

SIR WALTER SCOTT. 

g^ -71-1832.) 

z irns --;_ = :he l^gil iiei: :■: :E Eongs ::$:■■: 

tei S eott to her *: : m aa se and her ballads. 1 

life of r Scotland, as it then was, be 

'^" ridnentiy to the AyrsE b ughni; 



romantic past of Scotland, with lawlessness, 
its wild heroism, its cMvalric daring, its fascinating back- 

r : ■■■.:.'. :: :;.:v.:-:;;:.. _: E ::.:". jEr. ':^::-:.^: ^::~~ .-':.- 
El :■: :E. ': r.s: E:: : : : E.- £ : :tEE :E~; . 

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, in 1771. Edin- 
burgh, picturesque and romantic in itself,- stands in the 

nii=: :■:' ;. r£-ri:-n ;::""-:. ~-..z nr~: rials :: 

Life ... _.__. ... 

S::".az25 ;::.-". eh ~f _::^a: ::e i:u :: 
:hi= lis-ori: :^i:_ . Er~ verv lszts :: :lr :: v :es — T~eii=- 
EE. Eskiilr. Tevii-lair. :'- 1"--:: ElIs. Ls— i—Et. 
Yarrow, Stirling, the Ixossachs, Melrose. I ryburgh, Haw- 
E-inEer. — :.:t IE :•: ::r:_ ="i^r.s~::i. :-iE E :Es ~:> 
?:■■:■::'= "::.-!:. r l: - E- ~e E:~ ir.EE* lazi .... v. 
blood of men who had helped to make it famous was in his 
veins. " z In Scott/' writes Andrew Lang, "met Hie blood 
of Highlands and Lowlands, Celtic, Teutonic, and Nor- 
:...-.. *f:-:~: EzisEJ : : :k a :ri'±ir ::EE E :Ee :: :■: E; : 
l.T :izir :•: " --i.'.'.z ::'.'.: ::.'.-_:-':'. E E- A :;-:■■ ;'; 
Eis LErE Esitz:: :::zi :!:.: :\eE::: :Erf. EE1 "E: ::' 
Harden, " whose name I have made to ring in many a Bor- 
der ditty, and from his fair dame, the Mower of Yarrow: 
no bad genealogy for a Border MinstreL" 

Scott's father was a Writer to the Signet (attorney' his 
mother, Anne Rutherford, was the daughter of a distin- 
guished E iinburgh physician. When Scott was 
EfE, eighteen months old a serious illness left him 

incurably lame. He was a delicate child, and 
in his third year he was sent to his grandfather's farm at 

•_- ~El: h.i-5 :«rfi. t.iii - :•;■.;::!„; 3- ■:■'.-: :-z. :\ :: Eo-i-i-i i-- r -u 



SCOTT. 471 

Sandyknowe, in the valley of the Tweed. On a neighbour- 
ing crag was Smailholme Castle, the scene of Scott's ballad 
The Eve of St. John; a few miles away 

"... fair Tweed flows round holy Melrose, 
And Eildon slopes to the plain." 

Scott's conscious life began among these scenes; their 
influence entered into him as a child and remained with 
him until the end. He would lie on the grass, watching 
the sheep, or listen eagerly to strange tales of Border forays 
from the old shepherd, or "Cow Baillie," who had charge 
of the flocks and herds. Much of his childhood was passed 
at Sandyknowe, in familiar intercourse with the country- 
people. He listened eagerly to scraps of old ballads and 
ancient songs, to anecdotes of the great Jacobite risings of 
1715 and 1745, and thus, while his education was irregular, 
he came to know the past of his country as he only knows 
it who learns it not from books but from the traditions of 
the people themselves. So Darsie Latimer, in Redgauntlet, 
heard from the lips of Wandering Willie the marvellous 
tales of his ancient house. 

To this knowledge of Scotland's history and romance 
Scott added, as he grew to manhood, a minute acquaintance 
with the scenes in which all this drama of the 
o/scottifh past had been enacted. He knew the little- 
scenery and travelled country roads, the nooks and corners of 
Scotland, as only the man does who has explored 
and reexplored them, and has lain through whole sunny 
days among the heather. He knew the people, as he only 
does who enters the doors of many a lonely farmhouse. 
Such knowledge gave life and truth to his stories and 
his poems, when he retold in after life the 

"tales that charmed him yet a child." x 

1 Epistle to William Erskine, prefixed to the third Canto of Mar- 
mion. See the whole passage, and cf. Marmion, Canto iv., xxiv., where 
Scott pictures himself "a truant boy" lying among the broom on 
Blackford Hill. 



4"i p.:sz :■? ::;:!?.:: _:rz7..-.T~;7.i 



-■■ 



h.L.'. 'L 



r-r lii: :: iZ :7e ':::- ~: = is 
~Zl: 5:::.^ :: _:::t: iZiTilrv."' 

After translating German ballads and collecting Scot- 

.isb :::.- i: ~is bu: uarural :ba. It =b:ul:i Taur :be 
T-.i-svaf -urTL-E-r s:t: ;..:'. ras.= :_ :■: zrlr.ual :zzi pzsi- 
±t iir The Lay of the Last Minstrel, his first 

^ Lz£7Zi *- fnr:e-i:.T-i i:~cnzz: iu zbis b.rzziz::. app^are-:: 

Lu IS!:. buz- s-rau^zuzuss "u:zu "-- bz-aurr "' "be 

roz-zu. zbz- i:zzz-:zu ::' ::s sz::;" ':.- : 

srizrl.eu zi:vr.nr" :: izs Trrsf. ::^:iua:fu a public 

az:u5.zzuz-u ".-: lu— :^r 5 nil:; l-ItUizuv :: 

r&alircji. 



SCOTT. 473 

"He blew his bugle so loud and hoarse, 
That the dun-deer started at fair Craikcross ; 
He blew again so loud and clear, 

Through the grey mountain-mist there did lances appear; 
And the third blast rang with such a din 
That the echoes answer'd from Pentoun-linn, 
And all his riders came lightly in." * 

Scott's verse has lost its novelty, but in reading such 
lines as these, we can still feel the force of that magic which 
once enchanted the world. The Lay was followed by 
Marmion (1808), TJie Lady of the Lake (1810), and by other 
poems. 

Scott was not a careful workman like the scholarly and fas- 
tidious Gray, but his writings were the overflow of a vigorous 
and capacious nature, the unstudied expression 

writufg^ 60118 of a ful1 mind - We are t0 ° a? 1 t0 think of him 
merely as a poet and novelist and forget the 

astonishing amount of miscellaneous literary work he 
somehow contrived to accomplish. 2 While he was writing 
his poems, for instance, he found time to write reviews, com- 
pose a life of Dry den, and carry through a great quantity 
of editorial work. Yet these enormous literary labours 
did not interfere with the performance of his profes- 
sional and social duties. And in all this there was no 
apparent effort; all is done with that ease which suggests 
great power. 

Mean while, Scott's poetry had found imitators, and had 
lost something of the charm of novelty. Byron, who had 
sprung into sudden fame by the publication of the first 
instalment of Childe Harold (1812), was the poetic sensa- 
tion of the hour. Scott, who never thought himself a great 
poet, left the field open to his brilliant rival. He gave up 

1 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto iv. 

2 So far as I am aware, there is no complete edition of Scott's works. 
His Miscellaneous Prose Works fill twenty-eight volumes. 



474 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

writing poetry, he declared with a genuine frankness, 
because Byron "beat him," and in 1814 he published 

Waverley. The Lay of the Last Minstrel made an 
and the epoch in English poetry, Waverley made an epoch 
Waverley [ n English fiction. Scott had conquered and 

captivated the public once by his poetry, he 
was now to conquer it a second time by his prose. It 
would, indeed, be almost as difficult to find a parallel for 
the variety and extent of Scott's successes as for the 
almost inexhaustible fertility of his genius. But Waverley 
rather marks a stage in the consistent development of 
Scott's powers, than his entrance into a new field. His 
poems had been "metrical romances," novels in verse; 
his novels were romances in prose; the form is changed, 
but the sources of the inspiration are, in many cases, 
essentially the same. In the novels, however, there is a 
greater breadth and reality, and, above all, the characters, 
are more individual and more clearly defined. Waverley, 
which had been published anonymously, was followed by 
novel after novel from the pen of the same mysterious 
author. After writing some of his best stories of Scottish 
life, — Guy Mannering (1815) and The Antiquary (1816) 
among the number, — Scott won his first triumph in the 
field of foreign history by Ivanhoe (1819), probably the most 
popular and in some respects the most fascinating of his 
romances. A few years later he published Quentin Bur- 
ward (1823), the first of his novels in which he passed 
beyond the British Isles and laid the scene in foreign lands. 
Besides getting through an appalling mass of other work, 
Scott wrote over thirty novels and stories between 1814 
and 1831, an average of about two a year. Some of these 
are naturally better than others, but there is not one 
(unless it be Count Robert of Paris) that has not some 
special claim upon our affection, not one that we would 
willingly spare. All things considered, it must be ad- 



SCOTT. 475 

mitted that the average of excellence in the Waverley 
novels is surprisingly high. 

In 1812 Scott had bought land on the Tweed near 
Melrose, and there he built for himself the great house 
he called Abbotsford. For some years his life 
imd B faSare at Abbotsford was busy and successful. Scott 
was Sheriff of Selkirkshire and Clerk of the Law 
Courts ; he was the country gentleman, the most hospitable 
of hosts; he was antiquarian, poet, novelist, and man of 
letters, and — to his sorrow — he was man of business also, 
a silent partner in the firm of his friends and publishers the 
Ballantynes. In 1820 Scott was made a Baronet, and two 
years later he represented Scotland when the King visited 
Edinburgh. In 1826, when he was at the height of his 
fame, and when every ambition seemed gratified, Scott 
found himself involved as secret partner in the failure of 
the Ballantynes, and personally liable to the extent of 
£117,000. Scott's goodness and strength were equal to 
the emergency. He was no longer young, he had worked 
terribly and his health was breaking, but he set himself to 
the task with a steadfast courage. 

In two years (1826-1828) he had earned nearly £40,000 
for his creditors by his painful but unflinching toil. Shortly 
before his sudden change of fortune Scott had begun to 
keep a journal. This Journal, written for no eye but his 
own, has now been published, and the reader can now live 
through those years with Scott, and know him as he was. 
The Journal is a noble book, the deepest and noblest, in 
some respects, that Scott ever wrote. No one can read its 
brief, manly record of that gallant fight with adversity, no 
one can follow the story of that struggle, — saddened by 
domestic losses, by failing health and by waning powers, 
yet indomitably maintained until the last, — without know- 
ing that here was indeed a man. Great as Scott was in 
his prosperity, it was only in these years of scathing trial 



476 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

that his latent greatness was fully revealed. But the strain 
on body and mind was not to be borne. After Scott's 
return from a Continental tour, undertaken in the vain 
hope of restoring health to mind and body, he died peace- 
fully in his home at Abbotsford, September 21, 1832, 
"in the presence of all his children." "It was a beautiful 
day," writes Lockhart, "so warm that every window was 
wide open, and so perfectly still that the sound of all others 
most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed 
over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around 
the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes." 1 
He was buried in the ruined Abbey of Dryburgh, among 
the scenes and associations he had loved. 

There is no need to dwell on Scott's character. A hun- 
dred years ago Byron declared that Scott was the only 
successful genius he ever knew who was "as 
and work genuinely beloved as a man " as he was "ad- 
mired as an author." From that da}^ to this 
the world has loved Sir Walter and honoured his manhood 
as well as read his books. Even Carlyle, who undervalued 
the Waverley novels, declared that Scott had no cant 
about him, and that he was "the soundest specimen of 
British manhood put together in this eighteenth century of 
time." 

In Scott's works we possess a partial revelation of this 
healthy, strong, and manly nature. He wrote and edited 
a phenomenal number of books, but his literary labours, 
extensive as they were, absorbed only a part of his splendid 
energy. His life was more than his art ; he was bigger than 
all his books ; yet his books do truly although but partially 
represent him, and in them many of the sterling traits of 
his character survive. 

The position of Scott in literature seems, when we begin 
to reflect upon the matter, a strikingly isolated one. Scott 

1 Lockhart's Scott, vol. x. 217. 



SCOTT. 477 

did not preach; he did not analyse his own soul, or publish 

his deepest emotions to the world; yet his pre- 

Eeiation to decessors were didactic, while many of his con- 

his time. ' ■; 

temporaries and successors were given over to 
introspection and self-revelation. The truth appears to be 
that Scott not only wrote about the past, but that in many 
respects he belonged to it rather than to our modern world. 
The poetry of the nineteenth century is intellectual, heavy 
with its burden of thought; Scott's poetry, spirited, rapid 
in movement, and often careless in execution, is the poetry 
of action. Scott, indeed, was by nature an old-time man 
of action, rather than a modern man of letters. Born of 
good fighting-stock, he had in him the stuff out of which 
soldiers and leaders are made. Modern poets are fond of 
insisting upon the supremacy and permanence of art ; Scott 
set the doer of the deed higher than the poet who cele- 
brated it in song. It was this quality that helped to make 
Scott one of the few really successful narrative poets of 
English literature. Byron, in some respects his follower, 
was self-centred, and made Europe the confidant of his 
woes; Scott was reticent, honestly interested in other peo- 
ple, in his characters, in the story he had to tell, and in the 
scenes he described. His pleasure in an heroic deed or a 
beautiful scene is the simple, almost childlike delight of a 
manly, direct, and unsophisticated nature. He has not that 
deep sense of the mystery of things which pervades the 
work of a Coleridge or a Hawthorne. He is not, like Words- 
worth, a mystic or a philosopher. 

It is obvious that Scott's poetry lacks some of the char- 
acteristic beauties of modern verse — its depth, subtilty, 
and finish: we should also realise that it possesses many 
old-time merits. It was the minstrel's office to sing the 
deeds of heroes, and Scott is preeminent among the modern 
poets of war. His descriptions of battles, it has been often 
said, are the most Homeric in English literature. His 



478 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

ballads, The Eve of St. John, Red Harlaw, and the rest, 
are not mere ingenious imitations, they have the force and 
fire of the native minstrel. 

"What would'st thou do, my squire so gay 
That rides beside my reyne, 
Were ye Glenallen's Earl the day, 
And I were Roland Cheyne? ' 

' Were I Glenallen's Earl this tide, 
And ye were Roland Cheyne, 
The spur should be in my horse's side, 
And the bridle upon his mane.' " l 

Simple as this may seem, there is in it, as in so much of 
Scott's best verse, that thrill of the heroic, so often lost in 
the melodious refinements of recent poetry, that full- 
blooded manhood which all the dexterity of the anaemic 
modern cannot recapture. The same buoyancy and 
wholesomeness distinguish Scott's songs. No one would 
claim for hirri the lyrical genius of Shelley or Swinburne, 
but Scott's songs have a very positive excellence of their 
own. By all means let us delight in Shelley's Indian 
Serenade, or the Spring Chorus in Swinburne's Atalanta, 
but let us hold fast to our love of such songs as March, 
march, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Jock o' Hazeldean, or Proud 
Masie. Waverley was not the earliest historical 
novel, but Scott may be called the first 
master of historical fiction. If we would measure the 
greatness of his work, we must compare the Waverley 
novels with some of the romances that preceded them, 
with The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, or 
even with Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish 
Ohiefs (1810). What is the vital distinction between 
Scott's romances and such stories as these? It is not 

1 Ballad of Red Harlaw in The Antiquary, 



SCOTT. 479 

merely that he is a better antiquarian, — that he knows 
incomparably more about the costume or manners of the 
past, — it is, above all, because he was able to people 
those shadowy centuries for us with real, substantial 
men and women. Scott, like Shakespeare and many 
another, is not what is called "true to history," but, on 
the whole, he is surprisingly true to the fundamental and 
enduring facts of human life. Nor must we think of him 
solely, or perhaps even chiefly, as the great revealer of the 
past, as the predecessor of such picturesque and realistic 
historians as Macaulay or Froude. Scott is probably 
greatest when he puts aside the trappings of historical 
romance, and shows us the daily life of the Scottish 
people, — the fisher-folk, like the Mucklebackets, — in the 
smoke of its peat fires, in its humour, its poverty, its 
tragedy, and its homely toil. When we review the 
enormous range and the high average excellence of Scott's 
work in fiction, and remember the ease and rapidity with 
which it was produced, we feel that he exhibits a creative 
force rare even among the great geniuses of the literature. 
Scott, then, stands at the entrance to Victorian England, 
with many of the virtues and some of the limitations of an 
earlier time. He works in the primary colours. 

Summary. . xr j 

He is not intense, he does not question deeply, 
or analyse motives. He does not excel in that morbid 
anatomy of emotion which has become the fashion with 
many novelists of this present age of so-called superior 
culture and advanced ideas. He thinks that life is good 
and that there is wholesome enjoyment to be gained 
from action. He admires honour and courtesy and brav- 
ery among men, and beauty and gentleness and modesty 
among women. He has no " message;" he does not 
preach to us, but he was a kindly, high-minded gentleman, 
and it is good to be with him in his books. He rose to be 
great, "but he was always good," and his works bear 



480 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

witness to the breadth, sympathy, and purity of one of the 
great creative intellects of our literature, worthy indeed 
of a place among the immortals, side by side with Chaucer, 
and nearest to the feet of Shakespeare himself. 

CHARLES LAMB. 

(1775-1834.) 

Charles Lamb — called by Coleridge the " gentle- 
hearted Charles" l — was born in London, 1775. He was 
the youngest of three children; his family were in poor 
circumstances, his father being little more than a servant 
to a Mr. Salt of the Inner Temple. From his eighth to 
his fifteenth year, Charles studied as a " blue-coat boy" 
at Christ's Hospital, and here there sprung up between him 
and his fellow-student Coleridge a friendship which proved 
lifelong. On leaving school he obtained a clerkship in the 
South Sea House, and two years later in the India Office. 
His father's 'health failed, and Charles became the chief 
support of the little family. But the quiet of their house- 
hold was soon broken by a terrible event. Mary, Charles 
Lamb's sister, was seized witli violent insanity, and killed 
their mother (1796). Mary was taken to an asylum, 
where she recovered, and Charles procured her release on 
his becoming responsible for her guardianship. Thence- 
forth, after his father's death, he devoted himself to the 
care of his afflicted sister. For intervals, which he called 
"between the acts, " they lived quietly in the most devoted 
companionship, Mary aiding in her brother's literary work, 
and presiding at their little receptions, which Coleridge and 
sometimes Wordsworth attended. Then, again, Mary 
would "fall ill," and return for a time to the asylum. 

Through all this strain and distress, with occasional 

1 See Coleridge's poem, This Lime Tree Bower My Prison, in which 
several references to Lamb occur. 



LAMB. 481 

fears for himself, Lamb's cheerful and loving nature 
saved him from bitterness and despair, and he found 
courage to work. He lived his " happy-melancholy " 
life, and died quietly at London in 1834. His sister, 
whose name is forever linked with his as the object of his 
care and partner of his literary work, survived until 1847. 

In spite of daily work in the office, and of his domestic 
troubles, Lamb found time and heart for literature. As 
a boy he had spent many odd hours in the library of Mr. 
Salt, "browsing chiefly among the older English authors;" 
and he refers to Bridget Elia (Mary Lamb) as "tumbled 
early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good 
old English reading." This preference for Elizabethan 
writers endured through life, and their st}de and mode of 
thought became in some degree natural to himself. His 
first venture was a contribution of four sonnets to a book 
of poems on various subjects by his friend Coleridge (1796). 
After. some minor works, he published John Woodvil (1801), 
a tragedy on the early Elizabethan model, which was 

severely criticised, and later a farce, Mr. H (1806), 

which failed on the first performance. 

His Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who Wrote 
about the Time of Shakespeare, with notes, aroused new 
interest in a great body of writers then largely neglected, 
and showed Lamb himself a critic of keen natural insight, 
his suggestions often being of more value than the learned 
notes of commentators. Thus Lamb, with William 
Hazlitt, another critic of the time, helped in bringing 
about that new era of criticism in which Coleridge was 
the chief mover. In 1807 appeared Tales Founded on 
the Plays of Shakespeare, the joint work of himself aud his 
sister Mary. Lamb is best known, however, by his essays, 
first published, under the name of Elia, in the London 
Magazine (founded 1820). Written for the most part on 
trivial subjects, with no purpose but to please, they bring 



4S2 



RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 



ieei of 



ready to nasn out in a pun^ or to ugnt up witn a warm 
and gentle glow the cloud that overhangs him. In these 
essays we see Lamb's conservative spirit and hatred of 
change. His literary sympathies lay with the past, and 
he clung with fondness to the memories of his childhood. 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 

:i7S.5-:so9.; 

Thomas De Qtihtcev impresses "is as sol 
another plaice:, v.tho never entirely firmest 



:n 



Appearance 
in i 
character. 



their I 

curiosii 



en 



mean in g of their acts a: 
something eccentric an 
who knew him as frail, 
scarcely more than fi 

strangely assorted, his : 
gathered " thick! v are 
subtle lips." 1 Butt- 
set and gentle: for thi 
of an acute and unwea 
spoils from a lifetime : 
The strangeness :: h 
apart from other men. 
opher, with the inn:: a,: 

1 For descriptions of De 
in The Book Hunter, by J. 
Quincey, by J. R. Findlay, 

c: Le::ers Series. 



He 



stored with curious 

sets hint still nitre 
ium-eater, a philos- 






DE QUINCEY. 483 

of an Oriental; much of his life slipped away in dreams. 
His "natural inclination to a solitary life" was fostered 
and increased by the use of that terrible drug, which 
admitted him to the dreamlife of those trances, to that 
inward life of vision, he has so vividly described. At times 
he came out into the light and mixed with his kind, but 
he seems to have required solitude for the shaping and 
perfecting of his thought. "No man," he writes, "will 
ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect, who does 
not at least chequer his life with solitude. How much 
solitude so much power." * 

An acquaintance with De Quincey's life but deepens our 
impression of him as an eccentric dreamer and recluse. 
We read of his morbid dread of being pursued; we follow 
him in his solitary wanderings, and see him haunting the 
streets of Edinburgh, when the town is asleep, thinking 
his own unimaginable thoughts. The true life of De 
Quincey is that wonderful inner life of thought and vision 
into which we cannot penetrate; the outward events of 
his singular histor}^ must be here passed over with the 
merest mention. Thomas De Quincey was the 
life. 1 " 110678 son °f a merchant of literary tastes, and was 
born in Manchester in 1785. His father died 
when De Quincey was in his seventh year. His mother 
appears to have been a woman of high character and 
intelligence, but inclined to be over-rigid and unsym- 
pathetic. He early distinguished himself in the classics, 
becoming famous for his Latin verses, and being able, it 
is said, to converse easily in Greek at fifteen. He ran away 
from the Manchester Grammar School, to which he had 
been sent in 1800, finding the commercial air of the town 
"detestable," and the life of the school uncongenial and 
monotonous. After some months of wandering in North 
Wales he made his way to London, where he passed 
about a year in an aimless, vagrant existence; haunting 
1 Sus-piria De Profundis : "DreamiDg." 



484 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

the streets and city parks, and coming in contact with 
the darker side of the great capital. Having become 
reconciled to his family, he was sent to Worcester 
College, Oxford, in 1803, where he remained for five 
years. It was during his stay at Oxford that he began 
the use of opium; taking it, however, in moderation 
as an occasional means of mental exhilaration. He 
also began a more systematic study of German and 
English literature, his young enthusiasm fastening es- 
pecially on Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom he recog- 
nised as having, in his own time, restored the ancient 
greatness of English poetry. He longed to know Cole- 
ridge personalty, and in 1807 succeeded in meeting him at 
Bristol, making the acquaintance of Wordsworth later 
in the same year. After leaving Oxford (1809), he settled 
near Wordsworth in the Lake District at Town End, 
Grasmere. Except for occasional intervals this con- 
tinued to be his home for over twenty years. Here he 
enjoyed the friendship of the "Lakists," especially Cole- 
ridge; pored over German metaphysics, and indulged his 
passion for walking. In 1813, being "attacked by a most 
appalling irritation of the stomach," he greatly increased 
his use of opium, bringing down upon himself those ter- 
rible experiences which he has preserved for us in his 
Confessions. In 1816 he married a young country girl, 
Margaret Simpson, whose father owned a neighbouring 
farm. He began to be embarrassed for money, and after 
reducing his supply of opium by desperate efforts, he 
became the editor of a provincial journal. His literary 
Entrance career really began, however, in 1821, with the 
into liter- appearance, in the London Magazine, of his 
Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The 
novelty of the subject, the unsparing frankness of these 
self -revelations, and, we may assume, their wonderful style 
and poetic imagery, secured for the new writer an imme- 



DE QUINCEY. 485 

diate success. From this time De Quincey was distinc- 
tively a writer for magazines, being connected during the 
forty years of his literary life with Blackwood's Magazine, 
Tail's Magazine, Hogg's Weekhj Instructor, and others. His 
first contribution to Blackwood's, a translation of Lessing's 
Laocoon, appeared in 1826, and his relations with that 
magazine led to his settling in Edinburgh in 1830. He 
lived in various lodging-houses in the town itself, or in a 
cottage in the outskirts at Lasswade; a shy, obscure 
scholar, full of a winning grace and charm; a marvellous 
talker when he was in the mood; a lover of children; with 
all his oddities, a man of gentle and affectionate nature. 
The most important of De Quincey's last labours was the 
editing of a collected edition of his works which began to 
appear in 1853. 1 For the last two years of his life his 
strength was failing; the complete edition of his works was 
nearly finished when he was taken with his last illness, 
and died on the 8th of December, 1859. 

In actual years De Quincey was just halfway between 
Wordsworth and Macau lay, and the fact is suggestive of 
De Quincey n * s S ener al relation to literary history. Early 
as man of admiration and personal friendship connect 
him with Wordsworth and his great contem- 
poraries. His affinity with Coleridge is especially close, 
and with Coleridge he was instrumental in bringing Ger- 
man literature and philosophy into England. On the other 
hand, he is associated with the rise of the new periodical 
literature, and in that movement Macaulay had an im- 
portant place. Although De Quincey was fifteen years 
Macaulay's senior, the two men became contributors to the 
periodicals almost at the same time, for De Quincey was 
thirty-six when he published his Confessions, and Macaulay 

1 The first collected edition of De Quincey was published by Tick- 
nor & Fields (now Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), and appeared in 1851-52. 
De Quincey furnished Mr_ J. T. Fields, under whose supervision the 
work appeared, with some assistance for this edition. 



486 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

but twenty-five when, three years later, his "Milton" ap- 
peared in the Edinburgh Revieiv. De Quincey, therefore, 
while near in many ways to Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
is the immediate predecessor of the two great essayists, 
Macaulay and Carlyle. With Lamb, Hazlitt, Jeffrey, and 
Sydney Smith, De Quincey belongs to that group of essay- 
writers who were making an era in criticism. De Quincey's 
relation to this rising periodical literature may be com- 
pared to that which Addison held to the journals of his 
time, but between the work of the two essayists there is a 
difference, suggestive of the century of growth that lies be- 
tween. De Quincey's essays are longer and more elaborate 
than those of Addison; more learned, often more impas- 
sioned and poetic, and, above all, they have a greater di- 
versity of subject and of style. This diversity 
His diver- ma y ^ e ^ ue - m p ar j. ^ ^ e w j c i ell j n g interests 

and growing cultivation of the reading public, but 
it is more directly and naturally attributable to the many- 
sidedness of De Quincey himself. He was at the same time 
a born student and book-lover and a close and inquisitive 
observer of life. He delighted in intellectual subtleties and 
fine-drawn analysis, and yet possessed all that passion for 
style, that pleasure of the artist in effects of word-melody, 
which is emphatically the endowment of the poet. Al- 
though these varied elements of De Quincey's genius are 
constantly intermingled in a single essay, yet one or the 
other of them commonly predominates, according to the 
nature of the subject, sometimes to the entire exclusion of 
the rest. Thus the reminiscences of the Lake poets, or the 
autobiographical sketches, are, for the most part, the out- 
come of De Quincey's power to observe; his essays on such 
widely separated subjects as theology, political economy, 
Greek poetry, English politics, and German metaphysics, 
attest the range of his scholarship; while still other sides of 
his nature are revealed in the fantastic humour of his Mur- 



DE QUINCEY 487 

der Considered as one of the Fine Arts, in the narrative skill 
of The Flight of a Tartar Tribe, or in the prose-poetry of his 
Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow. And in the essays, the 
style, adapting itself to the subject, ranges from simple, 
unadorned exposition to impassioned apostrophes or deli- 
cately modulated strains of melody, filled with a dim and 
. visionary beauty, which, like the influence of 
English poetry, evades the last analysis. This change, 
prose. from the plainer and less inspired prose of the 

eighteenth-century essayists to De Quincey 's more highly 
wrought and emotional manner, is analogous to that which 
had taken place in poetry at a somewhat earlier period. The 
difference between Addison and De Quincey is comparable 
to that between Pope and Collins, or Coleridge. Moreover, 
De Quincey shares with some latter eighteenth-century 
poets the tendency to skip over his immediate predecessors 
and take for his models Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, 
and the great masters of the yet earlier times. 1 Each of 
De Quincey's great successors in the history of English 
prose has added, in his own way, to its resources and capa- 
bilities; each has, perhaps, surpassed him in certain direc- 
tions, yet he maintains undisturbed his supremacy in that 
" visionary dreamland," in which, says Leslie Stephen, " he 
is unri vailed. 7 ' 2 

The appreciation of the peculiar flavour of De Quincey's 
writings must be gained from the sympathetic reading of 

his works. His Murder Considered as One of the 
works" 1067 S Fine Arts is not a tragic masterpiece like Swift's 

Modest Proposal, with which it is usually com- 
pared, but, lacking the stifled wrath and pity which underlie 
that terrible arraignment, it is more buoyantly humourous, 
unweighted by the revolting elements which give to Swift's 

1 V. Leslie Stephen's " Life of De Quincey " in Dictionary of 
National Biography. 
* Ibid, 



45: RISE OP MODERN LITERATURE. 

satire a painful and hideous incongruity. When De Quin- 
cey [eaves his ''admirable fooling/' with its playful irony 
on the cant of aasthetic criticism, to tell the story of certain 
<f memorable murders /' the style becomes more simple and 
serious, and we come under the spell of his wonderful power 
native. Then, as in The Flight of a Tartar Tribe, or 
the murder story of Tlw Avenger, we feel that this great 
essayist was, within the brief limits he set himself, a master 
of the art of story-writing. But it is when De Quincey 
invades the province of the poet or of the musician, that 
his work becomes most distinctive. In his " dream-fugues," 
or dream-fantasies, he seems less anxious to impart certain 
definite ideas than to produce a positive emotional impres- 
sion by the effect of his composition as a whole. Thus in 
parts of his Confessions oj an English Opium Eater, or his 
rphrm da Projundis, as in his Dream-Fugue on the Theme 
oj Sudden Dec ' . his appeal is not primarily to the under- 
standing. And so marvellous is the power of melodious 
utterance, of imagery which excites and expands the im- 
agination by its very vagueness, of words steeped in the 
odours of association, that De Quincey achieves this emo- 
tional effect with but little aid from exact thought. 

Perhaps, on the whole, it is as a master of rhetoric that 
De Quincey is most admirable. Like a skilful organist he 
knows all the stops and combinations of his 
wonderful instrument; yet so skilful is he that 
at times our attention wanders from the theme in our 
admiration of the dexterity of the performer. Even in 
dealing with such a subject as the story of Joan of Arc, 
consecrated be} T ond all the artifices of rhetoric by pathos, 
nobility, and wonder, he is able to indulge in passages, 
which, brilliant as they are as bits of rhetorical "bravura," 
are apt to impress us as a tour de force. This careful elabo- 
ration of the style tends to leave us admiring, but cold. 
Professor Masson remarks that the motive force in De 



BYRON AND SHELLEY. 489 

Quincey was intellectual rather than moral, and the dis- 
tinction explains that touch of self-consciousness, that 
lack of the highest earnestness and sincerity, which at times 
we instinctively recognise in his work. Thackeray's lov- 
ing-kindness and compassion, Carlyle's ardent singleness of 
purpose, when he is truest to himself, are the expressions 
of moral qualities, and those writers move us as De Quincey 
does not, because we respond to the language of a pro- 
founder and more genuine emotion. "From my birth," 
says De Quincey, "I was made an intellectual creature, 
and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and plea- 
sures have been." 

While this preponderance of the intellectual over the 
more purely moral side acts as a limitation on De Quincey's 
power to satisfy all our needs, few English prose- writers 
are more worthy of study. Delightful in his humour, 
fascinating in his narrative, wonderful in the intricate 
perfection of his sentences, influential as the reviver of an 
impassioned and musically modulated style, De Quincey 
has taken his place among the great masters of English 
prose. 

The Later Poets of the Revolution. 
BYRON AND SHELLEY. 

The appalling plunge into murder and anarchy which 
followed hard upon the triumph of the Revolutionists in 
France, shocked into a sudden sobriety much of the vague 
enthusiasm for the cause of man. Thousands who, like 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, had joined in the contagious 
outcry for liberty and equality, recoiled like them in dis- 
gust from a revolution which had brought the dregs of 
society uppermost, and cast to the surface man's primitive 
baseness and cruelty. In France the towering genius and 
ambition of Napoleon were hurrying the nation back into 



490 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

despotism; in England, the government set its face against 
sorely needed reforms, through an unreasoning fear that 
change might prove the invitation to a Reign of Terror. 
Yet the Revolution had none the less begun a new epoch 
in the history of England and of the Continent; in spite 
of the efforts of conservative governments, its fires still 
smouldered everywhere beneath the surface, ready at a 
breath to burst into flame. After the battle of Waterloo 
(1815) the great powers of Europe met at Vienna and 
entered into a compact known as The Holy Alliance. The 
ostensible object of this alliance was to promote peace and 
good- will; its real purpose was to crush the spirit of democ- 
racy. It would have blotted the Revolution out of history, 
by reviving that older Europe which, in reality, no congress 
could restore. Austria, under her Prime Minister Metter- 
nich, threw her whole weight on the side of absolutism; but 
demonstrations among the students in the German univer- 
sities (1817), insurrections in Spain and Naples, and the 
heroic struggle^ of the Greeks under Turkish oppression, 
showed that the revolutionary spirit was unextinguished. 

England was passing through a critical period of pop- 
ular distress and dangerous discontent. On the one hand 
a government set in its conservatism; on the other a 
people unsettled by new industrial conditions, impoverished 
by overtaxation, impatient to gain a voice in their own 
government, and brought at length by poor crops to the 
verge of actual starvation. The assembling of the people 
for free speech was pronounced illegal; and at a great 
meeting at Manchester, the cavalry charged upon the crowd, 
and answered their petitions for a vote in Parliamentary 
elections with the edge of the sword (1819). A year later 
a conspiracy was formed to murder the members of the 
Cabinet. 

Four poets, - Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe 
Shelley (1792-1822), Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) , and 



AFTER WATERLOO. 491 

Thomas Moore (1779-1852), — all born during the last 
quarter of the preceding century, express in greater or less 
degree the spirit of this time. Each was, in his way, a poet 
of the Revolution, a lover of liberty, a believer in progress. 
When Wordsworth and Coleridge sang their first paeans to 
Liberty, her white robes were still stainless, her fame un- 
spotted. The poets of this younger group in their early 
manhood had looked on at the crimes committed in her 
name; they had breathed in an atmosphere heavy with the 
sense of failure; they were confronted with an oppression 
and misery calculated to make them embittered and re- 
bellious. 

In some respects, Lord Byron, in the power and brilliancy 
of his genius, in his audacious and dramatic personality, 
thrusts himself forward as the most truly representative 
poet of this time. We see in his life, character, and work, 
a rebellious arraignment of life, a passionate, impotent 
complaint against the entire order of things. 

George Gordon Byron was born in London, January 
22, 1788. The same year saw the birth in Germany of 
Arthur Schopenhauer, destined to be the great 
preacher to modern times of a philosophy of 
despair. The Byrons, or Buruns, were thought to be 
descended from a Scandinavian settler in Normandy. 
The family had come into England with the Conqueror. 
They were a fighting race; we find them in the field at 
Cre$y, at the siege of Calais, at Bosworth, at Edgehill. 
Ungovernable and proud, the spirit of the viking seemed to 
survive in them; and after long generations they produced 
a poet. Byron reminds us of the hero in some Greek 
tragedy, born to a heritage of guilt and suffering. His 
granduncle, "the wicked lord," was convicted of man- 
slaughter, and, like some of his nephew's miserable heroes, 
was cast out from human society. The father of the poet, 
Captain John Byron, known as "Mad Jack/' was a 



492 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

profligate and heartless spendthrift; his mother, Catherine 
Gordon, who traced her descent from James I., was a silly 
and impulsive woman, subject to furious paroxysms of 
temper. Having squandered his wife's fortune, Captain 
Byron left her in greatly straitened circumstance shortly 
after the birth of their son. The worse than fatherless 
child was thus left wholly at the mercy of an injudicious 
and passionate woman, who treated him, according to 
her passing whims, with alternate harshness and over- 
indulgence. Under these wretched conditions Byron's 
life began. He grew up a spoiled child, passionate, head- 
strong, sullen, and defiant. On all this was piled yet 
another misery — he was lame, owing to the deformity of 
one foot; and to his vain and morbidly sensitive nature 
this misfortune was a life-long torture. In 1798, by the 
death of "the wicked lord," he succeeded to the title and 
family estates. In 1801 he entered Harrow, where he was 
noted as a fighter, and acted as ringleader in a boyish 
rebellion again§t the authorities. Four years later he went 
to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he led the life of the 
idle and dissipated undergraduate. Here his "gyp," or 
college servant, spoke of him with respect as "a young 
gentleman of tumultuous passions. " In 1807 he published 
his first book of poems, Hours of Idleness. An unfavourable 
review of this youthful venture, which had in realit}' but 
little merit, aroused his passionate temper, and he struck 
back fiercely in a satire on English Bards and Scotch 
Reviewers (1809). Revolutionist as he was by nature, 
Byron had a deep and genuine appreciation of the historic 
greatness of Europe, and after two years of Continental 
travel (1809-1811), he gave the world the splendid record 
of his impressions in the first two cantos of Childe Harold 
(1812). The result was one of the most sudden and 
memorable successes in English literary history; in his own 
familiar phrase, Byron awoke one morning and found him- 



BYRON. 493 

self famous. The poetic star of Scott, who had been en- 
chanting the world with his vigorous ballads of romance 
and chivalry, declined before the brightness of this new 
luminary. The public turned from tales of Border warfare, 
from the mailed knights and moated castles of mediaeval- 
ism, to enter under Byron's guidance the unfamiliar 
regions of the East. The Giaour (1813) is the first of a 
succession of Eastern tales, in the metre of Scott, each 
of which increased the fever of popular enthusiasm. In 
these tales the Byronic hero, first outlined in Childe 
Harold, reappears under different names and varying dis- 
guises, with significant persistence in all his solitary, joy- 
less, and misanthropic personality. 

In 1815 Byron married Miss Milbanke, but after about 
a year they separated for reasons not fully known. The 
public turned furiously upon the man it had so lately 
idolised, and overwhelmed him with its sudden con- 
demnation. Smarting under a sense of injustice, Byron 
left England forever, pursued across Europe by the out- 
cry against him. After spending some time at Geneva 
under the stimulating influence of Shelley, he settled at 
length on the "waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay 
who betakes himself to the waters." During this time 
he wrote with extraordinary power and rapidity, pro- 
ducing, among a great number of other poems, the remain- 
ing cantos of Childe Harold, Cain, Manfred, and Don Juan. 
At length he seemed to weary of poetry, as he did of 
everything, declaring that he did not consider it his "vo- 
cation," but that if he lived ten years, he was determined 
to do something in new fields. His ardent and invincible 
spirit found the way. He threw himself into the cause of 
the Greeks, then struggling against Turkish despotism, and 
in 1823 chartered a vessel and sailed from Genoa in their 
aid. He reached Missolonghi, and was made commander- 
in-chief of an expedition against Lepanto. But the pre- 



494 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

sentiment of his approaching death was upon him. On 
his thirty-sixth birthday, while yet at Missolonghi, he 
composed some verses which seem touched with the spirit 

of prophecy: 

* 

"If thou regret'st thy youth, why live? 
The land of honourable death 
Is here. . . . 

Then look around, and choose thy ground 
And take thy rest." 

Death would not spare him for the soldier's grave he 
coveted. He was stricken with illness before he could take 
the field, and died at Missolonghi, April 19, 1824. In his 
delirium he imagined that he was leading his Suliotes at 
Lepanto, and cried out, "Forward, forward, follow me!" 
At length, as the last lethargy settled down upon his un- 
tamable and restless spirit, he said quietly to his attend- 
ant, "Now I shall go to sleep." He did not speak again. 

The life and work of Lord Byron were an immense force 
not only in the history of England but throughout Europe. 
His generation hailed him as the voice of their 
aspirations and complaints. He uttered for 
them, in verse of an indomitable and masculine vigour, 
full of a somewhat declamatory but magnificent rhetoric, 
their iconoclasm, their despairs, their unbeliefs; and he 
shares in both their weakness and their strength. Prob- 
ably no other English poet ever won such admiration from 
contemporary Europe; he gave English literature a larger 
place on the Continent, and, in Mazzini's words, "led the 
genius of Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe.'' l 
But while realising the importance of Byron in the large 
movement of democracy as a social and political force, 
our primary question is rather as to the permanence and 
value of his contributions to literature. The world has 

1 Essay on "Byron and Goethe." 



BYRON. 495 

moved rapidly away from the thoughts and tastes of 
Byron and of his day, but it is the distinction of the great 
poets to express not their own time merely, but that which 
is common to all times. Has Byron done this? Even 
when judged by the most liberal standards, it must be 
admitted that Byron's poetry does not possess in any great 
measure that " great antiseptic" a high excellence of 
style. He is dashing, brilliant, unequal, effective, but 
careless of finish and detail even to an occasional slip in 
grammar. The movement of his verse is nervous, strong, 
and free, but Shelley surpasses him in subtle lyrical quality, 
and in his inspired instinct for the aptest word. Yet we 
forget these shortcomings in his immense vitality and ease ; 
and when fairly caught in the rapids of his eloquence, 
we are borne along by the power of the orator joined 
to the power of the poet. In satire, by The Vision of 
Judgment and Don Juan, he towers above the other mod- 
erns as the successor of Dryden and of Pope. He has a 
feeling for large results; his descriptions are bold, broad, 
and telling, and the historic past of Europe lives in his 
swelling lines. He is the poet of the mountain-peak, the 
sea, and the tempest. A contempt for his fellow-men 
mingles curiously with his love of Nature and her solitudes. 
Unlike Wordsworth, he does not efface himself in her 
presence, but finds a congenial spirit in her moods of 
fierceness and of power. 

For the rest, Byron's life and work are the memorial 
of his imperious and colossal egotism. His demands on 
life were enormous, his disappointments corre- 
spondingly severe. Napoleon would have made 
the world minister to his lust of power; Byron, to his lust 
of pleasure. I myself would enjoy, yet I suffer: this is the 
sum of his arraignment of life. He could create but one 
type of hero, because he could not escape from the tyranny 
of his own personality. His heroes never learn of suffer- 



496 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

ing ; they stand solitary in the midst of the sufferings of the 
world in the insatiate egotism of their own woes, sullen and 
defiant until the last. There is a sublimity in the inveter- 
ate opposition of the individual will to the impassive fatal- 
ity of things; but in Byron this is weakened by the strain 
of selfishness, and at least a suspicion of insincerity. For 
Byron's romantic unhappiness and mad dissipations were 
more conducive to popularity than Wordsworth's placid 
contentment and sobriety. Yet while we may be un- 
certain as to how much of Byron's demonstrative despair 
was "playing to the gallery/' his devotion to liberty at 
least was genuine. He could exclaim while others doubted : 

"Yet Freedom! yet, thy banner, torn but flying, 
Streams like a thunderstorm against the wind." l 

His faith in freedom glows in his verse, and lends a parting 

and consecrating radiance to his unhappy life. But his 

conception of freedom is shallow and unregu- 

^libeJty! 011 lated ; he confuses rt w i tn the license to every 
man to do what shall seem good in his own 
eyes. " I have simplified my politics," he writes, "into 
an utter detestation of all existing governments." His 
heroes are, for the most part, desperate men, in reckless 
revolt against the social and moral laws. Haughty, un- 
yielding, self-centred, they are rather the foes to society 
than its saviours. Selim, in The Bride of Abydos, boasts of 
his love for freedom; but by freedom he means the un- 
checked license of the buccaneer, free to sail where he 
will, with a thousand swords ready to destroy at his com- 
mand. Byron is without a real social faith; impatient to 
pull down, he is powerless to lay hold on any rational or 
helpful law of life for himself or for others. He fails to 
see, with Ruskin, that anarchy is eternally a law of death, 

1 V, this passage, Childe Harold, Canto iv., stanzas xcvi.-xcviii. 



BYRON. 497 

to realise Wordsworth's joy in the submission to the high- 
est. His Cain, in which the deepest and most serious 
side of his nature found expression, is the direct antithesis 
of Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. It is the pathos of such a 
life as that of Byron that it brings its own revenges. His 
mad revolt against things as they are becomes, as he 
grows older, but more furious and bitter, until it reaches 
its brilliant but terrible consummation in Don Juan. 

The want in Byron's poetry lies deeper than any mere 
defect in manner. So far as it fails to present any reason- 
able and well-considered view of life; so far as it fails to be 
ennobling, helpful, and inspiring, just so far does it lack 
elements which make for permanence. For Byron himself, 
where we cannot admire, it is easy to pity and to excuse. 
Carlyle once likened him to a vulture, shrieking because 
carrion enough was not given him; he was rather a caged 
eagle, who in impotent protest beat out his life against the 
bars. The contest told even on his audacious energy. 
Young as he was, he could write, "The dead have had 
enough of life; all they want is rest, and this they implore." 
He would have two words put over his grave, and no more : 
Implora pace. The fascination of Byron's personality, the 
sadness of his story, will enshrine the memory of the man, 
a strong and tragic figure; while by many a poem, and still 
more by the superb vitality of many a brilliant passage, he 
has secured a lasting place among the poets of his country. 
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) stands with Byron 
as a poet of revolt; but his devotion to liberty is purer, 
his love for man readier to declare itself in 
deeds of help and sympathy, his whole life 
ennobled by loftier and more unselfish aims. In Byron 
we may see the masculine element of revolt audaciously 
interrogating earth and heaven, deficient in reverence and 
in faith, instant to destroy; in Shelley rather a feminine 
unworldliness, erring through its incapacity to adjust 



498 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

itself to the ways of earth; we see in him a theorist and 
a dreamer, building in the air his shimmering palaces of 
clouds until he " falls upon the thorns of life." Trelawney 
describes him as " blushing like a girl" at their first meet- 
ing, and speaks of his " flushed, feminine, and artless face." 1 
Strong yet slender in figure, with sensitive, almost girlish 
face, with deep-blue poet eyes, and a mass of wavy brown 
hair, early streaked with grey, Shelley in our imagination 
moves among other men as one apart. A daring inde- 
pendence of mind distinguished him from the first. It 
was his nature to accept nothing on the authority of others, 
but rather to question and prove all things for himself. 
He dreamed of what the world should be before life had 
taught him what it was, and in the fervour of his ideals of 
truth and righteousness, in his lt passion for reforming the 
world," 2 — young and confident, but too often hasty and 
mistaken, — he found himself misunderstood and at issue 
with the world. At Eton, where he was sent in 1804, he 
was solitary,, shy, eccentric; he did not join in the cricket 
or football, and was commonly spoken of by the boys as 
"Mad Shelley." The petty tryanny of the fagging system 
moved him to protest, and he set on foot a conspiracy to 
suppress it. In his school days, in one of those sudden 
flashes of prophetic insight that sometimes illuminate the 
spirit in early youth, his ideal of life came to him with 
strange distinctness. He tells us how he then made this 
resolve, weeping: 

"I will be wise, 
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
Such power; for I grow weary to behold 
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise 
Without reproach or check." 

To a temperament so ardent, lofty, and ill-fitted for 
conformity to the routine thought and usage of ordinary 

1 Trelawney's Recollections of Last Days of Shelley and Byron, p. 26. 

2 Preface to Prometheus Unbound. 



SHELLEY. 499 

men, life was certain to prove but a hard matter at best, 
and Shelley's youth was passed under conditions which, 
for such a nature as his, were peculiarly unfortunate. 
His father, Sir Timothy Shelley, a country gentleman in 
Sussex, was the embodiment of commonplace and pre- 
judiced conservatism; limited and bound by the habits 
and traditions of his class, it was inherently impossible 
for him to understand his son's character or tolerate his 
aims. Shelley's loving and loyal nature made him sus- 
ceptible to influence, but his fiery zeal and independent 
temper would not brook authority, and any attempt to 
compel him to act against his convictions aroused in him 
the spirit of the martyr. His conflict with authority came 
but too soon. His active mind, prone to doubt and to 
inquire, hurried him into scepticism, and in 1811 he was 
expelled from Oxford, which he had entered five months 
before, for a pamphlet On the Necessity of Atheism. Shortly 
after quitting Oxford, he married Harriet Westbrook, a 
mere schoolgirl, who had excited his pity and sympathy, 
and who was decidedly his inferior in social position. Sir 
Timothy, who had been seriously provoked by his incom- 
prehensible son's disgrace at Oxford, was naturally incensed 
anew by this act of folly, and the two young creatures — 
Shelley was but nineteen and his girl-wife three years 
younger — were cast adrift. After an interval, a small 
allowance was granted to them by Sir Timothy and Harriet's 
father, and they wandered from place to place, Shelley 
absorbed in his theories, his poetry, and his projects for 
reclaiming the world. Queen Mab, a notable though im- 
mature production, was the work of this time, and was 
privately printed in 1813. Toward the close of the same 
year Shelley and his wife separated, and after her death in 
1816 he married Mary Godwin, who proved herself more 
capable than the unfortunate Harriet had been, of giving 
his complex and delicately poised nature the sympathy 



500 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

and help he longed for. William Godwin, Mary Godwin's 
father, was a theoretical reformer, who preached the peace- 
able abolition, through the pure force of reason, of law, 
government, and religion; and Shelley, who had previously 
felt an enthusiastic admiration for his teachings, was now 
brought into closer relations with the advocate of these 
extravagant doctrines. He had thus, on the one hand, 
broken with authority and custom, by his expulsion from 
Oxford and his breach with his father, and on the other he 
had surrendered himself, in his impulsiveness and imma- 
turity, to the guidance of a man who expressed the sweep- 
ing and unscientific notions of social reform then current 

among extremists. Alastor (1816), Shelley's next 
other poems, poem, in which he describes the lonely wanderings 

and death of a poet who pursues the unattain- 
able and ideal beauty, discloses to us the springs of Shelley's 
own nature. Like Marlowe, Shelley was possessed by the 
"desire for the impossible," and his insatiable and buoyant 
spirit mounts into regions where we cannot follow. In the 
nobility of its verse and the beauty of its natural descrip- 
tions, Alastor shows a great advance in poetic power, and 
from this time the splendours of Shelley's genius steadily 
disclose themselves. In his next poem, The Revolt of Islam 
(1818), he poured out those hopes for the regeneration of 
the world, which are a vital force in his life and poetry. 
Shelley was less blindly destructive, less hopeless, than 
Byron. He saw that the disappointment which succeeded 
the failure of the Revolution had "unconsciously found relief 
only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair," and he 
wrote The Revolt of Islam in the belief that men were 
"emerging from their trance." 1 His hero, Laon, is not a 
Lara or a Manfred, lost in selfish gloom and misanthropy, 
but a poet-prophet, aspiring after excellence, who falls a 

1 Preface to The Revolt of Islam. The passage first quoted appar- 
ently refers to Byron. 



SHELLEY. 501 

willing martyr to his love for men. In contrast to Byron's 
chaotic despondency, the poem strikes anew the note of 
hope and prophecy; it suggests to us that the interval of 
doubt and depression is passing; it proclaims a social faith. 
Mankind is to be saved by Love, and in the poem "Love 
is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should gov- 
ern the moral world." The whole poet-world of Shelley is 
transfigured and glorious in the radiance of this faith. The 
doctrine of The Revolt of Islam was but reiterated in one of 
the noblest of his poems, the lyrical drama of Prometheus 
Unbound (1820). There we see Prometheus, the type of 
humanity, or of the human mind, chained to the precipice 
by Jupiter, the personification of that despotic authority 
which clogs man's free development. The hour of libera- 
tion is at hand. Asia, the incarnation of that ineffable 
ideal which Shelley sought, the "life of life," and "shadow 
of beauty unbeheld," journeys to meet Prometheus. Jupi- 
ter is overthrown, the rule of despotism broken. Prome- 
theus unbound is united to Asia, that is, the mind of man 
is wedded to its holiest aspirations, and the world enters 
upon the reign of universal love. 

"Love from its awful throne of patient power 
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour 
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, 
And narrow verge of crag-like agony springs, 
And folds over the world its healing wings." 1 

So in the closing chorus of Hellas (1822), a drama inspired 
by the Greek war for independence, the poet's vision sees 
in the coming Golden Age the return of "Saturn and of 
Love." 

"Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, 
But votive tears and symbol flowers." 2 

1 V. the speech of Prometheus to Asia, Act iii. Sc. 3, and the beau- 
tiful lyric "Life of Life, thy Lips Enkindle," Act ii. Sc. 5. 
" HeUas. 



502 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

In spite of his professed opinions, Shelley is in this poem 
one of the most intensely Christian of English poets. In 
Mrs. Shelley's words, he had "an exceeding faith in the 
spirit of Christianity/' and he went about among men the 
embodiment of love and pity, the helper of the helpless 
and the poor. 

In 1818 Shelley left for the Continent, travelling and 
writing among the most beautiful scenes. A number of 
poems composed in the year following show the deep effect 
produced upon him by the news of the Manchester massa- 
cre * and by the thought of the oppression and misery at 
home. Among these are The Masque of Anarchy, in which 
Murder appears as Lord Castlereagh and Fraud as Lord 
Eldon, with its passionate appeal to the people to rise 
against their oppressors; " England in 1819," and "The 
Song to the Men of England." In these poems the demo- 
cratic sympathies of Shelley take a passionate and dis- 
tinctly practical form. The brief space between 1818 and 
his untimely death in 1822 is the period of Shelley's greatest 
work. Year rjy year the fulness of his genius was reveal- 
ing itself. He had learned of life and of suffering; his faith 
was deepening, his mind maturing through experience and 
incessant study. He was becoming a. more consummate 
master of his art. That labyrinthine profusion of fancy 
and imagery, which dazzles and confuses us in many of his 
earlier poems by its very splendour and excess, is chas- 
tened and restrained in his later songs, which stand pre- 
eminent among the most exquisite creations of lyric art. 
But English poetry was to suffer a sudden and irreparable 
loss. In 1822, while sailing on the Gulf of Leghorn, Shelley 
was caught in a squall off the Via Reggia and perished. 
So swiftly and so terribly did that breath of the Eternal, 
whose might he had invoked in song, descend upon him. 2 

1 7. p. 490, supra. 

' V. last stanza of Adonais. 



SHELLEY. 503 

Criticism can do but little toward helping us to an appre- 
ciation of Shelley's character and work. We dare not at- 
tempt by any cold analysis to reach the secrets 
Sdwork °f a na -ture so intricately and exquisitely fash- 
ioned; to apportion praise and blame, or to 
reconcile real or apparent contradictions. He was de- 
nounced by his contemporaries for acts and opinions 
which were rightly considered immoral and hurtful to the 
order and happiness of society. No admiration for 
ShehW should lead us to think lightly of his faults or blind 
us to their disastrous consequences. How far he was 
morally responsible for erroneous principles sincerely 
held we need not here inquire; what we should realise is 
that his wrong actions were in conformity with what he 
himself believed to be right. To be just to him we must 
identify ourselves, for the time, with his view of life. We 
must realise also the nobility of many of his aims, his 
childlike purity and innocence, which shrank back pained 
and perplexed at the defilements of the world. 

Shelley's poetry, like his nature, must be known through 
sympathy rather than through criticism. No English 
poet is more remote from those tangible facts of life which 
daily engross us, none has fewer points of contact with the 
average mental state of the average man. Like his 
Skylark, Shelley mounts from the earth as a cloud of fire; 
and his song reaches us from blue aerial heights. If we 
have an answering touch of his nature, if we have it in us 
to leave the ground, we shall be caught up likewise into 
those luminous and unfathomable spaces where he sings. 
To understand Shelley, we must recall those moments 
when some deep feeling has shaken the dominion of the 
ordinary in us, when the familiar has grown strange to us 
and the spiritual near, or perhaps when a vague desire for 
a something unguessed has possessed us : then, if we imagine 
those feelings intensified a hundredfold, we are within 



504 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

sight of the confines of Shelley's world. This, indeed, is 
more particularly applicable to his larger and more diffi- 
cult works, as The Witch of Atlas and Epipsychidion; 
many of his shorter and more familiar poems are free from 
obscurity, yet full of Shelley's peculiar magic. In his 
purely lyrical faculty, his power to sing, Shelley is 
almost without a parallel in English poetry. 

JOHN KEATS. 

(1795-1821.) 

The inclination to associate Keats with Byron and 
Shelley, his contemporaries in poetry, is natural, but in many 
Keats ways misleading. It is true that the three poets 

Byron, and were not far apart in age, and that none of 
Shelley. them lived to be old. It is true that each in his 
own way expressed some phase or quality of youth : Ityron, 
its ungoverned passions and ill-considered despairs; 
Shelley, its generous, if visionary, aspirations; Keats, its 
freshness of unquestioning enjoyment, its undulled and 
exquisite sensibility to the beauty of the things of sense. 
But the points of difference between Keats and the older 
members of the group greatly exceed these more accidental 
or external marks of resemblance. While Shelley's noble 
tribute to Keats's memory and genius in Adonais links the 
two poets together in our thoughts, the personal relations 
between them were extremely slight, and in the nature 
of their genius they were widely different. Byron and 
Keats were even more widely separated. Byron speaks 
contemptuously both of Keats and of his poetry; while 
Keats, on his part, shows no trace of Byron's influence. 
In truth, Keats was entirely apart from the democratic 
and revolutionary movement to which Byron and Shelley 
belonged. Those kindred impulses, the pity for human 
suffering and the " passion for reforming the world," which 



KEATS. 505 

had been a growing inspiration and power in English 
poetry from Thomson to Shelley, are absolutely alien to 
the poetry of Keats. His genius draws its nourishment 
from widely different sources, and to understand his re- 
lation to literary history we must approach him as the 
bringer of a fresh impulse into English poetry, the force 
of which is not yet spent. 

Byron and Shelley, the poets of democracy, were repre- 
sentatives of the aristocratic class; Keats was the son 
of the head hostler in a livery stable at Moorfields, London. 
The poet's father, Thomas Keats, had married 
the daughter of his employer, and succeeded 
to the management of the business at the Swan and Hoop. 
There John, the eldest child, was born October 31, 1795. As 
a boy he appears to have been at first chiefly remarkable 
for beauty of face, courage, and pugnacity. According 
to the painter Haydon, who knew him well in after years, 
he was, "when an infant, a most violent and ungovern- 
able child. " When about seven or eight years old he was 
sent to a school at Enfield, a small town some ten miles 
north of London. Here fighting — according to one of 
his schoolfellows — was "meat and drink to him." He 
is described as violent and generous, as "always in ex- 
tremes," "in passions of tears or outrageous fits of 
laughter." 1 He was a general favourite, yet he was 
often morbidly miserable and given to groundless sus- 
picions of his companions. In such descriptions we 
recognise that acute sensibility to joy and suffering, 
that subjection to moods and sensations, which character- 
ised him in after life. "You tell me never to despair," 
he wrote to Haydon in 1817; "I wish it were easy for me 
to observe the saying — truth is, I have a horrid morbidity 
of temperament." 2 A year later he wrote to Baily, "I 

1 This schoolfellow was Edward Holmes ; v. Colvin's Keats, pp. 7, 8 
* Letters, edited by H. B. Forman, p. 17. 



506 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

carry all matters to an extreme, so that when I have any 
little vexation it grows in five minutes into a theme for 
Sophocles. " l During the earlier part of his school days 
Keats seemed destined for military success rather than 
for distinction as a poet; but when he was about thirteen 
the passion for study took possession of him, and he read 
with as much intensity as he had fought. He knew no 
Greek, and in Latin his classical attainments extended no 
further than the iEneid, 2 yet he found out a way to Greek 
mythology through the pages of Tooke's Pantheon, Lem- 
priere's Classical Dictionary, and Spence's Polymetis. 
Seldom has the strength and trustworthiness of that 
instinct which leads genius to select and appropriate the 
material most suited to its development been more 
strikingly illustrated. In this introduction to literature 
Keats had the benefit of the friendship of Charles Cowden 
Clarke, the son of the head master and a young man of 
decided literary tastes. 

During these years at Enfield, Keats lost his father 
and mother,, and in 1810, when he was but fifteen, his 
guardian took him from school and apprenticed him to a 
Mr. Hammond, a surgeon at Edmonton. As this town 
is but a few miles from Enfield, 3 Keats was able to keep up 
his intimacy with the Clarkes. The influence of Charles 
Clarke on Keats thus continued uninterrupted. The 
two friends read together, and discussed their favourite 
poets, and, through Clarke, Keats found a new world of 
delight in the poetry of Spenser. There is a close affinity 
between the genius of Spenser and that of Keats, and in 
reading the Faerie Queene the younger poet, with his 
beauty-loving and romantic nature, must have felt that 

1 Letters, edited by H. B. Forman, p. 176. 

2 C. C. Clarke's chapter on Keats in his Recollections of Writers. 

3 Edmonton lies between London and Enfield, and about three or 
four miles from the latter place. 



KEATS. 507 

he had come into his inheritance. Clarke says that he went 
"ramping" through the poem "as a young horse would 
through a spring meadow." l It seems to have been this 
pure enjoyment of Spenser's poetry that first stirred in 
Keats the desire to write, and, according to good authority, 
his Imitation of Spenser was his earliest attempt at verse. 
In another early poem, full of boyish raptures over chiv- 
alry, he does homage to Spenser, and calls on his gentle 
spirit to hover about his steps : 

"Spenser! thy brows are arched, open, kind, 
And come like a clear sunrise to my mind." 2 

At eighteen Keats had thus gained access to those two 
enchanted regions — the world of Greek mythology and 
the world of mediaeval romance — which were to give their 
especial colouring to much of his greatest work. In con- 
sequence of a quarrel with Mr. Hammond, Keats did not 

complete the term of his apprenticeship, but 
London" 1 came up to London in 1814, and continued his 

study of medicine in the London hospitals. 
He seems to have acquitted himself creditably in his pro- 
fessional duties, but the whole force of his nature went out 
more and more toward poetry, which rapidly became his one 
absorbing passion. Through Clarke, who had also settled 
in London, he read Chapman's translation of Homer, and 
celebrated his conquest of this new kingdom for his 
imagination in a sonnet which is one of the first revelations 
of the extent of his poetic power. Soon after he met 

Leigh Hunt, and began a friendship which was 

to exercise an important influence on his career. 
Hunt, who was about ten years Keats 's senior, was an 
amiable, but somewhat volatile and superficial man, with a 
fine feeling for the beauty of a poetic phrase, but no great 

1 Recollections of Writers, "John Keats." 

2 Specimen of an Induction to a Poem. 



508 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

strength or creative power. His poetry, while sometimes 
pleasing, had a tendency to mere prettiness, and was too 
apt to sink into a colloquial familiarity which he mistook 
for ease, but which was beneath the dignity of art. His 
literary essays were graceful and appreciative. Hunt was 
the head of what was derisively called the "Cockney School." 
He had aroused the bitter antagonism of the great Tory 
periodicals, Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly, by 
the position he had taken in politics as well as in literature, 
for circumstances had made him a hero of the young Lib- 
erals. When Keats came to London, Hunt was in prison, 
in consequence of certain unflattering comments on the 
Prince of Wales. After softening his captivity by procur- 
ing a flowered wall-paper and by much reading of Spenser 
and the Italian poets, Hunt became, to Liberals, a martyr 
to liberty, and to Tories an object of attack. He had, 
moreover, aroused the opposition of the Edinburgh critics 
by an attack on the poetry of Wordsworth and of Scott. 
By becoming a poetic disciple of Hunt, Keats consequently 
laid himself open to castigation from two of the leading 
critical periodicals of the day. Keats's first volume of poe- 
try, indeed, which appeared in 1817, escaped notice. It 
was a thin volume of short poems, full of youthful crudities, 
and marred by a weak effusiveness and sentimentality of 
Endymion phrase. But the publication of his long poem of 
and its Endymion in the year following brought down 

critics. upon the new a dh eren t f the " Cockney School" 

the brutal abuse of the Quarterly and Blackwood's, or, as 
Landor named it, " Blackguard's" Magazine. We know 
now that the injustice and cruelty of these attacks were not 
the cause of Keats's early death, that Shelley was mistaken 
when he called the reviewers murderers, and Byron when 
he said that the poet of Endymion had been " snuffed out by 
an article." * Indeed, after the first shock, Keats showed 

1 Don Juan, Canto xi. stanza Ix. 



KEATS. 509 

a real restraint and manliness. " Praise or blame/' he de- 
clared, "has but a momentary effect on the man whose love 
of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his 
own works. ... I never was afraid of failure; for I would 
sooner fail than not be among the greatest.'' * Keats him- 
self spoke of Endymion as a " feverish attempt rather than 
a deed accomplished," 2 and while it gives abundant evi- 
dence of high poetic power, it lacks the sustained excellence 
and the fine restraint which are found in the greatest works. 
Not only was the poem a failure in the eyes of hostile cri- 
tics : Keats had failed to express in it the real capacity that 
was in him. He was without a profession (for he had aban- 
doned medicine), and without adequate means of living. 
He had his genius, and his resolve to be among the great 
English poets after his death. He was twenty-three when 
Endymion was published; he was not twenty-six when he 

died. Yet in the three years that remained for 
vetopment ^ m > darkened toward the close by mental and 

physical sufferings, he won a lasting place among 
the poets of England. It is not the precocity of Keats that 
surprises us; it is the rapidity of his poetic development; 
the fact that he passes at one stride from the relaxing and 
mawkish strain so recurrent in the earlier poems, and from 
the "indistinct profusion" 3 of Endymion, to such highly- 
wrought artistic masterpieces as Hyperion, The Eve of St 
Agnes, and the Ode on a Grecian Urn. It argues well for 
Keats 's manliness and for his whole-souled devotion to his 
art, that, in the face of hostile criticism, his genius could 
thus suddenly and triumphantly assert itself. At this 
time (1818), a rival passion began to take its place beside 
his love of poetry. He met Miss Fanny Brawne, and his 

1 Letters, p. 207, Forman's edition. 
3 Preface to Endymion. 

s Shelley's phrase; v. Forman's edition of Shelley's Prose Worhs, 
vol. iv. p. 186. 



510 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

first feelings of mingled attraction and disapproval gave 
way to a violent infatuation. It is a feverish and, on Keats's 
side, a pitiable love-story, and carries us rapidly to a tragic 
ending. Signs of ill-health had before this begun to show 
themselves, the chances of any immediate recognition as a 
poet were most slight, and to Keats's excitable and jealous 
temperament, love meant tumult and too often torment. 
He held to his work, but the uncertainties and vexations of 
his position preyed upon him. "I shall be able to do noth- 
ing," he writes. "I should like to cast the die for love or 
death." 1 A few months later (February, 1820), consump- 
tion declared itself, and from the first Keats had no hope 
of his own recovery. In the same year he collected and 
published most of the poems which he had written since 
the appearance of Endymion, and on these poems his fame 
chiefly rests. In the fall of 1820 it became evident that 
Keats could not survive another winter in England, and in 
September he sailed for Naples with his friend Joseph 
Severn. He lingered for a short time in what he called 
bitterly a "posthumous existence," and died in Rome 
February 23, 1821. His last words were to his faithful 
Severn, "Thank God, it has come." 

The moving principle of Keats's life and poetry is the 
worship of beauty. Somehow there had been lodged in 

this son of a London hostler a seemingly mi- 
Se? 8 aS raculous power to know and love beauty and to 

embody this fine perception of it in a beautiful 
form. To him the exercise of this power to perceive and to 
create was the supreme, almost the sole, interest. It took 
the place of a religion. The first articles of his creed 
remain for us in two familiar passages; in his conviction 
that 

" A thing of beauty is a joy forever," 
1 Letters, 19th October, 1819, p. 433, Forman's edition. 



KEATS. 511 

and that beauty and truth are one. 1 We may add to 
these his prose statement that "with a great poet the 
sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or 
rather obliterates all consideration/' 2 and we may recall 
further his significant words to Miss Brawne, "Why may 
I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could 
never have lov'd you?" 3 The delight in beauty in its 
outward manifestations depends partly on the soul and 
partly on the senses. Physically, Keats was endowed 
with so fine and pleasure-loving an organisation that his 
senses as well as his soul were delicately responsive to out- 
ward impressions. This peculiar freshness and openness 
to impression lies on the surface of his character and work. 
"The glitter of the sea," says Haydon, "seemed to make 
his nature tremble." He luxuriates in sensations, he goes 
into raptures over the taste of claret or of fruit. In his 
work he communicates something of his keener suscepti- 
bility to our duller and more phlegmatic senses. That 
wonder of romance, The Eve of St. Agnes, for instance, is 
a poem of sensuous impressions. We are made 

Til ft T^TTft of 

st. Agnes. to ^ ee ^ the aching cold, or the "poppied warmth 
of sleep;" to hear the resonance of the silver 
trumpets, or the pattering of the "flawblown sleet;" to 
see the "carved angels, ever eager-eyed;" to taste the 
jellies "soother than the creamy curd." It is a poem 
of contrasts : the radiance of light and colour, the storm and 
darkness; the palsied crone and the ancient beadsman, 
beside the absorbing happiness and ecstasy of love and 
youth. It is this same fastidious susceptibility to beauty 
that declares itself in the almost unrivalled verbal felicity 
of Keats's best work. So rich are his best poems in this 
magical quality — as, for instance, his finest odes — that 

1 See opening of Endymion and the end of Ode on a Grecian Urn. 
8 Letter to his brother George, Letters, p. 57, Forman's edition, 
• Ibid., 351. 



512 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

we linger over them, held by pure delight in the perfection 
of the phrase. This full felicity of expression, perhaps 
Keats's greatest distinction as a poet, is the quality he 

seems to have admired most in the poetry of 
of form. others. As a boy, he had gone into raptures 

over the epithet " sea-shouldering whales;" and 
in the numerous allusions to the works of his favourite 
poets which are scattered through his letters, his enthusiasm 
is always for the phrase, never, or rarely, for the idea. He 
wrote to his friend Bailey that he looked "upon fine 
phrases like a lover." x With his openness of nature to 
beautiful impressions and this fastidious felicity of phrase, 
Keats luxuriated in two great realms of beauty — the 
world of the classic Greek, and the world of mediaeval 
romance. His fellowship with the one has given us such 
poems as Hyperion and the Ode on a Grecian Urn; his 
fellowship with the other, St. Agnes' Eve and La Belle 
Dame sans Merci. Shelley put his humanitarianism into 
his Prometheus; under Tennyson's classic poems is the 
undercurrent of modern ideas; the soul of Coleridge's 
Ancient Mariner is modern within its quaint old ballad- 
form. But Keats is remote, not merely from his modern 
surroundings, but from the spirit of his time ; in his classic 
poems he is close to Swinburne, and in his medievalism 
he is really the precursor of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphael- 
ites. Besides such poems as those of which we have 
spoken, Keats has given us in many of his odes and sonnets 
specimens of his personal feelings and moods. 

That Keats was an inspired interpreter of beauty; that he 
has enriched the literature with poems which, though few 

in number, possess a fascination of their own, 
fi s e t lace as these things are beyond question. Yet after 

this is freely recognized, the place which Keats 
holds among the great poets of England remains still 
1 Letters, p. 364, Forman's edition. 



KEATS. 513 

undetermined. Our feeling on this matter will depend 
largely upon our ideal of poetry and our convictions as to 
its true aims. If we believe that the highest function of 
the poet is to give pleasure through the creation of a beauty 
that appeals primarily to the senses, the poetry of Keats 
will come near to realising our ideal. If, on the Other 
hand, we believe that the highest and truest poetry, while 
possessing this beauty, adds to it a beauty more purely 
spiritual, a teaching and uplifting power, and an element 
of thought, we shall find Keats 's poetry distinctly in- 
sufficient for our highest moods. It must be remembered, 

moreover, that the absence of the ethical and 
tf poetry 7 spiritual elements in the poetry of Keats is not 

accidental, but is the result of his most settled 
convictions in regard to poetry as an art. He was opposed 
to the idea that the poet should be a teacher, a belief which 
was the inspiration of Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tenny- 
son, and Browning. He condemned the philosophic element 
in Wordsworth's poems; he condemned the love of human- 
ity and the desire to serve it in Shelley's. The artist, he 
declared, must have no purpose beyond that of the poetic 
effect. Such a purpose is wrongly thought of as the god 
of the work, "but," he adds, "an artist must serve Mam- 
mon." l This theory of poetry is plainly in keeping with 
the tastes and character of Keats himself. Supreme in 
one province, he is grievously lacking in the highest as- 
pirations, in spirituality, and in the ardour for right and 
truth. Apparently devoid of a religious sense, his percep- 
tion of beauty grows less sensitive as beauty becomes less 
physical and more abstract. Back of the work of the 
greatest poets we recognise the tremendous force which 
comes from the whole mind and nature of the man. 
Keats's poetry, beautiful within its limits, is circumscribed 
by the serious limitations of Keats himself. In Lamia, 
1 Letter to Shelley, Letters, p. 505, Forman's editioa 



514 RISE OF MODERN LITERATURE. 

for instance, which has been pronounced "one of the 
most glorious jewels in the crown of English poetry/' 1 
the luxurious emotions of the senses, the fascination of 
the Circe, are idealised and elevated, into a 
superiority to thought and to truth. We are 
called upon to sympathise with Lamia, the serpent- 
temptress transformed into a beautiful woman; a fair 
illusion, destroyed by the eye of truth. Lamia beseeches 
her lover not to think, knowing that "a moment's thought 
is passion's passing bell." We cannot but recognise in 
this the spirit of Keats when he wrote, "Oh, for a life of 
Sensations, rather than of Thoughts!" 2 Lamia dies, but 
Truth, the philosopher who has wrought her destruction, 
ought, says the poet, to have his temples bound with 
"speargrass" and the " spiteful thistle." Contrary to 
his theory, Keats has here given us a poem with a teach- 
ing; but the teaching, while characteristic, is neither 
elevated nor true. It is possible that the shortcomings 
of Keats are the result of immaturity, and that, had he 
lived, his genius would have declared itself in other ways. 3 
What he might have done is matter for conjecture; but 
we know that his later poems are not immature but 
highly finished, and it is clear that his advance toward a 
poetry of moral power and philosophic thought would 
only have been gained by a radical change in his views 



1 A. C. Swinburne, "Keats," in Encyclopedia Britannica, ninth 
edition. 

7 Letters, p. 53, Forman's edition. 

3 Matthew Arnold contends that, from what we know of Keats, it 
is probable that his genius would have developed in "moral interpreta- 
tion." He quotes from Keats's letter to show that he had a growing 
desire for study, and gives this as a proof of his intellectual possibili- 
ties. He omits, however, a later passage in which Keats declares 
that he prefers pleasure to study (Letters, p. 432). Probably Keats 
often expressed a passing mood, and too much weight should not be 
given to his often impulsive utterances 



KEATS. 515 

of poetry, and by not so much a growth as a total making 
over of the man himself. Judging him by 
HnStatiwig etlC wna ^ ne nas done, we are constrained, unless we 
adopt his views of poetry, to admire with certain 
reservations. His poetry is the song of the Sirens. It is 
weakened by a strain of effeminacy; and its atmosphere, 
often heavy as with sweet and cloying odours, is deliciously 
enervating. We miss in it the manly vigour of those 
mountain heights where, as in Wordsworth or Shelley, the 
air is pure and clear. We should lose much were we unable 
to yield ourselves to that spell of warm and abundant 
loveliness of which Keats is master, but if we rejoice in the 
life-giving air that blows on the high altitudes of poetry, 
we will not drift into that unthinking or wholesale adula- 
tion in which lovers of Keats are apt to indulge. The 
motto from his master Spenser which Keats prefixed to 
Endymion is the index to the spirit of all his work; it 
expresses Keats's ideal, but we may question whether that 
ideal is the highest: 

"What more felicity can fall to creature 
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?" 



CHAPTER II. 

VICTORIAN ENGLAND. 

(Cm. 1832-1901.) 

The year 1832, which saw the death of Sir Walter Scott 
and the beginning of a more democratic system of govern- 
ment in England, may be taken as a convenient date for 
the beginning of the Victorian Age in literature. This 
date, however, is merely approximate, for, in reality, the 
limits of a literary period can seldom be so rigidly defined. 
To speak strictly, some of the great Victorian writers, as 
Carlyle, Macaulay, and Tennyson, began their work a few 
years before this date ; while Queen Victoria did not come 
to the throne until 1837, or five years later. It is the more 
difficult to draw a positive line between the Age of Words- 
worth and the Age of Tennyson, because, in many important 
ways, the one is the continuation of the other. During the 
Victorian Age new writers, of course, succeeded the old ; 
but the older writers, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, 
continued to influence the literature of the new time. More 
than this : politically, socially, and industrially, the Victo- 
rian Age is the child of the latter eighteenth century ; its 
progress toward democracy, its advance in science and 
scientific inventions, but continue the movement which 
began in the days of the French Revolution, or with the 
labours [of Brindley or Watt. In the Victorian Age the 
range of men's activity was increased, their lives were 
materially altered, but the same forces were at work below 
the surface as in the preceding time. 

Three of these determining forces in the life and litera- 
ture of Victorian England were : 

516 



ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY. 517 

(1) The advance of democracy. 

(2) The general diffusion of knowledge and of literature. 

(3) The advance of science. 

These were not separate but interdependent forces; 
each acted on the others, and their combined influence 
did much to determine the distinguishing spirit of the 
epoch and its literature. 

1. The advance of democracy. By the year 1830 the 
conservative reaction which had followed 'the meeting of 
the Congress of Vienna, had given way before a fresh out- 
break of the revolutionary spirit. In this year the Bour- 
bon king, Charles X., was driven by the liberals from the 
throne of France. The event awakened in Germany a 
responsive agitation, and the progress of democracy in 
Europe, which had but suffered a temporary check, was 
resumed. In England this tendency showed itself in 
changes so radical that they constituted in fact a peaceable 
and legal revolution. The period of prophetic anticipation, 
the period of disappointment and oppression, were past, 
and the nation entered upon an era in which the ideas of 
democracy were to be actually put into practice through a 
series of important reforms. 

For centuries the landholding class had governed the 
country and monopolized the government offices. Many 
people were also excluded from a share in political power 
by reason of their religious views. By successive acts 
many of these religious disabilities were removed, dissen- 
ters and Roman Catholics permitted to hold certain town 
and government offices, and by the Emancipation Bill 
(1829) Romanists were allowed to sit in Parliament. 
Still more momentous was the overthrow of the political 
supremacy of the landowner. The passage of a Reform 
Bill in 1832 extended the franchise to] the middle class, 
which during the industrial and commercial growth of the 
past century had increased in wealth and importance; 



518 VICTORIAN ENGLAND. 

and by this and other changes Parliament became more 
directly representative of the people's will. A second 
Reform Bill in 1867 admitted the working class to a share 
in political power, while a third and still more sweeping 
act in 1884 still farther extended the right of suffrage. 
Within half a century the real governing power in Eng- 
land was thus peaceably transferred from an exclusive 
upper class to the great bulk of the nation. William IV. 
found England practically an oligarchy. Under Victoria 
it became an almost unadulterated democracy. The 
wide-spread results of this transference of power are mat- 
ters of history. It tended to weaken class distinctions, to 
better the condition of the working class, and to give 
increased opportunities for popular education. It was 
clearly related to that great growth of the reading public 
and those wider means for the spread of knowledge which 
were so intimately connected with the literature of the 
time. The social changes and agitations of which these 
Reform Bills were but a part were certainly one of the 
greatest features in the history of the time. It has been 
said that " The most impressive thing in Europe to-day 
is the slow and steady advance of the British democracy." x 
Thus that wider human sympathy which we saw spring up 
and increase during the eighteenth century, uttering itself 
with gathering power and distinctness in a long succession 
of poets from Thomson to Shelley, took in the Victorian 
period an increasingly definite and practical form. 

But these reforms were far from satisfying to many who 
longed for a yet more radical change. The philanthropic 
efforts of Robert Owen (1771-1858) in behalf of the fac- 
tory operative and the poor were followed toward the 
middle of the century by the Christian socialism of Charles 
Kingsley (1819-1875) and Frederic Denison Maurice 
(1805-1872), and later (in 1860) by the new economic 

1 Rae's Contemporary Socialism, 1884. 



ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY. 519 

teachings of John Ruskin (1819-1900), the importance of 
whose work as a social reformer was slow to receive due 
recognition. Labour on its part banded itself together in 
organizations which have become a distinctive feature in 
our modern society, and on every side there were signs of 
expectancy and social unrest. These aspirations and un- 
certainties have written themselves in the pages of the 
literature. They were echoed in the poetry ; they became 
a great formative influence in the novel, the distinctive 
literary form of the day, either directly, from Godwin's 
Caleb Williams (1794) to Besant's All Sorts and Conditions 
of Men (1882), and Mrs. Ward's Marcella (1894), or in 
less obvious and more subtle ways. 

2. The more general diffusion of knowledge and literature. 

The more general diffusion of education, the prodigious 
multiplication of cheap books and reading matter in every 
conceivable shape, was closely related to the democratic 
spirit of society and to the advance of applied science. 
Education, like political power, was no longer monopolized 
by an exclusive class ; the readers were the people, and 
reading matter, if not literature in the stricter sense, was 
now produced by them and for them. This reading public 
had been widening since the days of Defoe and Addison. 
The early years of the eighteenth century gave birth to 
the periodical essay, and many of the great English news- 
papers — The Morning Chronicle, The Times, The Morning 
Post, The Morning Herald, founded during the last quarter 
of that century — began that wider influence of jour- 
nalism which is one of the features of the present time. 
The rising literary importance of these great journals 
during the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries 
is illustrated by the fact that Coleridge, Lamb, Thomas 
Campbell, and William Hazlitt, a noted English literary 
critic, were among their contributors. Newspapers multi- 
plied rapidly during the nineteenth century, and their 



520 VICTORIAN ENGLAND. 

circulation was enormously increased by the removal of 
the stamp and paper duties which were formerly levied 
upon them, and by the improved mechanical means for 
their production. 1 "A Preaching Friar," wrote Thomas 
Carlyle in 1831, " settles himself in every village and 
builds a pulpit which he calls Newspaper. Therefrom he 
preaches what momentous doctrine is in him, and dost 
not thou listen and believe? " Through the pages of his 
Weekly Register (established 1815) it was possible for 
William Cobbett, the son of a day-laborer in Surrey, to 
become one of the most powerful political writers of his 
time. The opening of the nineteenth century saw the intro- 
duction of another important agency in widening the power 
of literature, in the foundation of the great reviews. The 

Edinburgh Review, an organ of Whig or Liberal 
uterature. opinions, was started in 1802, nearly a century 

after the foundation of The Toiler. This pro- 
voked the establishment, in 1809, of The London Quar- 
terly, which came forward as an advocate of opposite 
political views. Among the reviews and periodicals that 
followed were Blackwood's Magazine in 1817, The West- 
minster Review in 1S24, and two weekly papers of a high 
order, The Athenceum and The Spectator, in 1828. These 
magazines had the support of many of the ablest and best 
known writers of the day, and many of them were im- 
mensely stimulating to the public interest in literature. 
Even the partisanship and ferocity of some of the book 
reviews were not actually without good result, as they 
tended to promote literary discussion. Thus Francis 
Jeffrey, the first editor of The Edinburgh, pronounced his 
sentence of condemnation on the poetry of Wordsworth; 
Coleridge defended his friend's poetic principles in his 

1 In 1827 there were 308 newspapers published in the United King- 
dom, of which 55 were in London. In 1887 the number of newspapers 
published in the British Islands is given at 2125; 435 of which were pub- 
lished in London. V. Ward's Reign of Victoria, vol. ii. p. 509. 



POPULAR LITERATURE. 521 

Biographia Literaria (1817); Wordsworth himself stated 
them in prefatory essays to his poems. Hazlitt, Lamb, 
Southey, De Quincey, and Walter Savage Landor were 
writing during these early years of the century on books 
and writers past and present, so that the time may be 
thought of as a period of literary criticism. 

But literature and knowledge were passing even beyond 
these limits to leaven the poorer and more ignorant strata 

of society. A literature more especially de- 
nteratore. v °ted to the cause of popular education became 

important about the time of the first Reform 
Bill. Men like Charles Knight (1791-1873), the brothers 
William and Robert Chambers, George L. Craik, and 
Samuel Smiles consecrated their lives and energies to this 
work, the importance of which it is not easy to over esti- 
mate. In the year of the passage of the Reform Bill 
(1832) two cheap magazines were established. The first 
of these, The Penny Magazine, was established in London 
by Charles Knight; the second, Chambers' Edinburgh Jour- 
nal, was started quite independently by the Chambers 
brothers. Both of these were enormously popular, the 
former reaching a circulation of two hundred thousand 
copies at the end of a year. Besides cheap and good 
periodical literature, there were penny cyclopedias, cheap 
editions of good authors, and the beginning of those means 
for the diffusion of literature and knowledge which have 
now become so familiar. By the legislative provision for 
popular education (Foster Education Act, 1870), and by 
private enterprise, Victorian England showed her deep 
sense of the duty and the necessity of a general education. 
Carlyle spoke in the best spirit of the time when he de- 
clared, "If the whole English people, during these ' twenty 
years of respite/ be not educated, ... a tremendous 
responsibility before God and man will rest somewhere." * 

1 Past and Present, Bk. iv. chap. ill. 



522 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

3. The advance of science. Science, which has attracted 
to its service a large proportion of the intellectual force of 
modern times, has conspicuously affected the life of Eng- 
land in two distinct ways. First, by its application to 
directly practical ends it has wrought a revolution in the 
material conditions of civilized life. So far as his physical 
surroundings are concerned, the civilized man of to-day 
lives in a new earth which science has created for him. 
And second, by its researches into the history and nature 
of things, by theories which touch upon the problems of 
man's origin and destiny, science has been a disturbing or 
modifying element in almost all modern thought, and in 
almost every department of intellectual activity. In brief, 
it has both transformed life and altered our conception 
of life ; it has done much to change the aspect of the 
world without, and it has penetrated the life of the very 
soul within. 

Many of those important changes in the outward con- 
ditions of daily life which have followed the practical 

application of science to life, date from about 
5ci ® nce ^ d that period which we have fixed upon as the 

beginning of the Victorian era. In 1830 the 
Liverpool and Manchester Railroad went into opera- 
tion, and six or seven years later a great period of rail- 
road construction began. The first electric telegraph in 
England was erected in 1837, the year of Victoria's acces- 
sion, and steam communication with the United States 
was begun in the following year. These new means of 
locomotion and transportation, like those new means 
of production which immediately preceded them, have 
helped to create the modern spirit, the note of person- 
ality which marks the time. The facilities for quick and 
easy intercourse meant the further breaking down of old 
barriers between town and country, between section and 
section ; they meant the lessening of provincialism and 



MODERN ENGLAND. ♦« 523 

ignorant prejudice, and they meant the opportunity for 
the transmission of newspapers and of news; so in this, as 
in many other ways, modern science came as an ally of 
modern democracy. On the other hand these changes 
have rudely broken in upon seclusion and contemplation; 
modern industrialism, with its railroads and factories, has 
made the world uglier; intenser competition and greater 
chances of money-making have made man more selfish 
and sordid. Wordsworth lived to lament the invasion of 
the peaceful retirement of his beloved Cumberland by the 
railway and the tourist. 

" The world is too much with us, late and soon," 

at least twice a day it gets itself recorded in print, and 
insists upon thrusting in our faces the catalogue of its 
latest crimes and scandals. It is as though we lived in 
the street, 

11 jaded with the rush and glare 
Of the interminable hours," x 

and were unwilling or unable to take sanctuary in the 
dimness and coolness. All this tended to foster in men 
that feverish haste and activity, that desire for the new 
thing, however ignorant they might be of the old, which 
seems hardly conducive to the creation of enduring mas- 
terpieces of literature. " Wherever we are, to go some- 
where else ; whatever we have, to get something more ;" 
these, according to Ruskin's caustic aphorism, are the 
moving desires of the modern world. 

The second effect of the advance of science, its modifi- 
cation or disturbance of thought or belief, is also to be 

taken into account in our study of Victorian lit- 
Science and ., rt « /\ • i 

modern erature. The year 1830, which witnessed a tn- 

thougnt. um ph of applied science, was also productive in 

purely scientific investigation. Sir Charles Lyell's Prin- 

1 The Buried Life, Arnold. 



524 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

ciples of G-eology (1830), which revealed the vast extent of 
the earth's past, was one of the first of those many books of 
science which, during the nineteenth century, combined to 
modify some of the fundamental ideas of life. This book, 
says Professor Huxley, " constituted an epoch in geologi- 
cal science," and also prepared the world for the doctrine 
of evolution. This last named theory of the beginning 
and the law of life, put forth by Charles Darwin and 
Alfred Russell Wallace in 1859, steadily forced upon 
those who accepted it a wholesale readjustment of their 
ideas comparable to that which the discovery of Copernicus 
forced upon our forefathers. It struck at the root of men's 
conceptions of existence ; its influence reached far outside 
the ranks of the specialist, into the whole world of thought, 
moving men to utter again the old cry : 

"Woe is me! 
Whence are we, and why are we ? of what scene 
The actors or spectators? " 

With new problems and aspirations, social, scientific, or 
religious ; with -a world that seemed to move with an ever- 
accelerating rush and swiftness ; Victorian literature was 
heavy-laden with the burden of men's seriousness and com- 
plaining. The childlike lightsomeness of Chaucer's Eng- 
land, the young energy of Shakespeare's, the shallow flip- 
pancy and finical polish of Pope's, all these had passed. 
In Arnold's magnificent and melancholy lines, the England 
of the day was # 

" The weary Titan, with deaf 
Ears, and labor-dimmed eyes, 

Bearing on shoulders immense, 
Atlantean, the load, 
Well-nigh not to be borne, 
Of the too vast orb of her fate." * 

This is the England whose voice is heard in the Victorian 
literature. 

1 " Heine's Grave." 



THE NEW ERA. 525 

The new conditions of life and thought which thus took 
rise in England in or about the year 1832, found a group 
The new °^ y° un S writers capable of interpreting them. 
era in By that year the extraordinary outburst of 

erature. p 0e ^i c genius which began during the closing 
years of the preceding century had spent its force. The 
year 1832 saw the death of Sir Walter Scott. Words- 
worth, Coleridge, and Southey still lived, indeed, but their 
work was done; while the recent and untimely deaths of 
Keats, Shelley, and Byron had made a sudden gap in 
English poetry. Into the firmament thus strangely left 
vacant of great lights, there had risen a new star. In 
1830, Alfred Tennyson, the representative English poet 
of the era, definitely entered the literary horizon by the 
publication of his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Macaulay and 
Carlyle, two writers who were to occupy a large space in 
the prose of the opening era, had entered literature a few 
years before the advent of Tennyson ; and immediately 
after his coming many of the other great writers of the 
epoch crowded in quick succession. The next decade saw 
the advent of Robert Browning (Pauline, 1833) ; Eliza- 
beth Barrett, afterward Mrs. Browning (Prometheus Bound, 
1833) ; Charles Dickens (Sketches by Boz, 1834) ; William 
Makepeace Thackeray (Yelloivplush Papers, 1837), and 
John Ruskin (Salsette and Elephanta, 1839). 

It is not easy to form any general conception of the 
literary period thus begun. The seventy years which 
make up the Victorian era were years of immense literary 
activity and productiveness ; many, and often conflicting, 
elements found expression in them, and even in this 
comparatively short space, so rapid became the move- 
ment, so fierce and unremitting the pressure of the time, 
that successive phases of thought or style followed each 
other with confusing swiftness. The general features of 
the Victorian literature will grow clearer to us through 



526 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

a study of some of those authors who represent its diver- 
sified activity. 

The practical and prosperous temper of an England 
that seemed entering upon a period of solid comfort and 

unprecedented prosperity, is reflected in the 
Macaulay. work of the brilliant essayist and historian, 

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859). 
From his first publication, an essay on Milton in the Edin- 
burgh Review, 1825, Macaulay 's career was one of unbroken 
and well-deserved success. Few writers have brought to 
their work more enthusiasm for literature, or more patient 
industry; few have ruled over a wider range of reading, or 
collected a store of information as diversified and exact. 
Macaulay was the born man of letters. Before he was 
eight he was an historian and a poet; having compiled a 
Compendium of Universal History, and written a romantic 
poem, The Battle of Cheviot From the first he was an 
insatiable reader; from childhood he began laying up in 
his prodigious memory those ever-accumulating stores 
which were -to constitute his magnificent literary equip- 
ment. His nurse said "he talked quite like printed books/' 
showing a command of language which greatly amused his 
elders. When he was about four, some hot coffee was 
spilled on him while out visiting with his father. In 
answer to the compassionate inquiries of his hostess he 
replied: "Thank you, madam, the agony is abated." 1 As 
Macaulay grew to manhood his juvenile tastes were turned 
into solid acquirements, and there is something substan- 
tial and well-rounded in the life built on these good founda- 
tions. He was successful as statesman and as author. He 
was courted and admired in the most distinguished circles; 
and his wide reading, his phenomenal memory, his brilliant 
conversation, sparkling with spoils from many literatures, 
helped to make him a social and literary leader. He 

1 Trevelyan's Macaulay, i. p. 40. 



MACAULAY. 527 

thoroughly enjoyed the world and the age in which he 
found himself ; finding it full of substantial comforts, and 
a sensible and rational progress. England with her ever- 
lengthening miles of railroads, with the smoke of her thou- 
sand factories, with her accumulating gains, delighted him 
with her tangible and visible successes. But to his shrewd 
and practical intelligence the spiritual hungers and altera- 
tions, the mysterious raptures and despairs of finer and 
more ethereal natures, must have seemed wholly unintelli- 
gible. After reading Wordsworth's Prelude he writes in 
his diary: "There are the old raptures about mountains 
and cataracts; the old flimsy philosophy about the effect 
of scenery on the mind; the old crazy mystical metaphys- 
ics; the endless wilderness of dull, flat prosaic twaddle; 
and here and there fine descriptions and energetic declama- 
tions interspersed." * Macaulay felt, to use his own oft- 
quoted phrase, that "an acre in Middlesex is better than a 
principality in Utopia." The very soul of genius looks out 
at us through Shelley's dreamy and delicate features; we 
know where his principality lies. Carlyle thought once, 
as he looked unobserved at Macaulay 's sturdy, blunt feat- 
ures, with their traces of Scottish origin, "Well, anyone 
can see that you are an honest, good sort of a fellow, made 
out of oatmeal." 2 In truth Macaulay was as naturally 
and happily in accord with the average sentiment of the 
mass of men about him, as Shelley was out of tune with it ; 
and his ability, unlike the mystical power of Shelley, differs 
from that of the average man less in kind than in degree. 
Not only has such a temperament a better chance of happi- 
ness than a more ideal one; not only is it better fitted for 
wordly success; in Macaulay 's case it was this very glorified 
commonplaceness which qualified him for the great work 
he had to do. Robust, upright, manly, un-ideal, it was 

1 Trevelyan's Macaulay, ii. p. 239. 
* Trevelyan's Macaulay, i. p. 23. 



528 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

easy for the growing reading public to understand him, 
and to these popular qualities he added wide scholarship 
and a style of absolute clearness, of captivating move- 
ment, and unwearied brilliancy. We cannot wonder that 
Macaulay, following close on those means for widening the 
sphere of literature already noted, should have become to 
the growing circle of readers the great popular educator of 
his time. His essays, covering a wide range of subjects, 
brought history and literature to the people through the 
pages of the magazines. India came home to them in his 
Clive and Hastings; Italy in his Machiavelli; England in 
his Chatham; literature in his Milton and his Johnson. 
The comparative compactness with which these subjects 
were handled, the impetuous rush and eloquence of the 
style, its picturesqueness, richness, its sparkling antithe- 
sis, took the public by storm. And Macaulay has still 
another qualification as a missionary of learning : he was, 
in Lord Melbourne's neat phrase "cock-sure of every- 
thing." Such confidence hardly indicates power of the 
finest order; but none the less it is often grateful to un- 
trained minds, which qualification and reservation tend to 
confuse. As an English writer * says, in an admirable bit 
of criticism on this point: " uninstructed readers like this 
assurance, as they like a physician who has no doubt upon 
their case." 

The great work of Macaulay 's later years was his His- 
tory of England from the accession of James II. On this 
task he concentrated all the fullness of his powers: he 
brought to it a high standard of excellence, an infinite 
capacity for taking pains, a marvellous style, and the 
loving labor of a lifetime. More than a century before, 
Addison had declared that through The Spectator he would 
bring philosophy out of the closet, and make it dwell in 
clubs and coffeehouses. Macaulay, who is to be associ- 

1 Rev. Mark Pattison. 



CARLYLE. 529 

ated with Addison as accomplishing a similar work on a 
far larger scale, wrote before the publication of his History, 
"I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which 
shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel 
on the tables of young ladies." 1 The immense sale of his 
book, absolutely unprecedented in a work of this char- 
acter, is overwhelming testimony to Macaulay's position 
as a popularizer of knowledge. "Within a generation of 
its first appearance," writes his biographer, "upward of 
one hundred and forty thousand copies of the History 
will have been printed and sold in the United Kingdom 
alone/' while according to Everett no book ever had such 
a sale in the United States, " except the Bible and one or 
two school-books of universal use." 2 

We should be careful to estimate the importance of 
Macaulay's work at its full value; we should appreciate 
the soundness and manliness of his life and character; we 
should realize his peculiar significance " at a time when 
literature was becoming more democratic. At the same 
time we should feel that, great as his gifts were, they were 
not of the highest order; excellent as his aims were, they 
were not the loftiest nor the most ideal. If we compare 
the two famous essays on Johnson, the one by Macaulay 
and the other by Carlyle, we shall perceive that the first is 
the brilliant, graphic production of a capable and highly 
trained man of letters; that the second has the penetrative 
insight, the more exquisite tenderness of the man of genius. 

In passing from Macaulay, the versatile and accom- 
plished man of letters, to Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), 
the great man whose Titanic energy and invigor- 
Cariy" ating power sought an outlet through the mak- 
ing of books, we are impressed, at the very 
outset, with a strong sense of dramatic contrast. Study 

1 Trevelyan's Macaulay, ii. p. 327. 
* Trevelyan's Macaulay, ii. p 327. 



530 VICTORIAN ENGLAND. 

the portraits of the two men: Macaulay, as he looks out 
at us from the front of Trevelyan's biography, round- 
faced, unwrinkled, smooth-shaven, complacent; Carlyle, 
with his tumble of hair and shaggy beard, his gaunt face, 
worn and lined with innumerable wrinkles, his sunken 
cheeks and deep-set, wonderful eyes. It is the face of an 
inspired peasant; lit up at times, so those who knew him 
tell us, by a strong and passionate vehemence, expressive 
of scorn, of humor; expressive, too, of that infinite reserve 
of tenderness that lay in the deep places of his strong 
nature. To this man life was terribly and tragically earn- 
est. He battled through it, with set teeth and iron 
purpose, as a strong man forces and shoulders his way 
through a tangled jungle. "Woe unto them," he said to 
his friend Sterling, and reiterated in his essay on Scott — 
"woe unto them that are at ease in Zion." He lives 

"As ever in his great Task-master's eye;" 

he adds to the. stern and inflexible conception of duty char- 
acteristic of his Calvinistic ancestry, that indwelling sense 
of God's presence so strong in the. Hebrew prophet, so 
rare in our modern Western world. To him as to Words- 
worth the world is "the living garment of God," creation 
definable in one or another language as God's "realized 
thought." Standing thus in the porch of the infinite, he 
never loses that awe and wonder which the most of us 
never feel, or, feeling, so easily put by. A man. who 
dwells with "the immensities and the eternities" is not 
likely to adapt himself to the world's ways, or agree with 
the world's judgments; rather like the risen Lazarus in 
Browning's Epistle of Karshish, he brings from other re- 
gions a standard which the world cannot understand. 
Hence, while Macaulay was in comfortable accord with an 
age of material progress, teaching, as Emerson said, "that 
'good' means good to eat, good to wear, material com- 



CARLYLE. 531 

modity," Carlyle often stood apart in flat antagonism and 
fiery denunciation. Uncompromising to himself, he was 
habitually uncompromising toward others; crying out to 
a faithless and blinded generation as some stern prophet 
of the desert. Writing in Sartor Resartus of Teufels- 
drockh, the imaginary philosopher into whose mouth he 
put his own teaching, and whose experiences in many 
instances are but reflections of his own, Carlyle says: 
" In our wild Seer, shaggy, unkempt, like a Baptist living 
on locusts and wild honey, there is an untutored energy, 
a silent, as it were, unconscious strength, which, except 
in the higher walks of Literature, must be rare." * This 
may stand, with certain reservations, as a picture of 
Carlyle himself; in its spirit and broad outlines essentially 
true. 

Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, a little village 
in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, December 4, 1795. Froude 

describes the place as "a small market town 
Carlyle s consisting of a single street, down the side of 

which, at that time, ran an open brook. The 
aspect, like that of most Scotch towns, is cold, but clean 
and orderly, with an air of thrifty comfort." 2 About 
sixty miles to the northwest of Ecclefechan lay the dis- 
trict which had brought forth Burns, that other great 
Scotch peasant, of whose life Carlyle was to be the truest 
interpreter. Some thirty miles to the south, at the edge 
of the Cumberland Hills, was the birthplace of Words- 
worth. Carlyle's father, James Carlyle, was a thrifty, 
hard-working stone-mason; a sterling, unapproachable, 
reticent man, with strong religious convictions, and a 
faculty of concise and vigorous speech. He possessed 
" humor of a most grim, Scandinavian type/' a quality 
which notably characterized his son. James Carlyle was 

1 Sartor Resartus, Bk. i. chap. iv. 
* Froude's Carlyle, i. p» 3. 



532 VICTORIAN ENGLAND. 

one of five brothers, graphically described by an appren- 
tice to one of them as "a curious sample of folks, pithy, 
bitter-speakin' bodies, an' awfu' neuters." According to 
Carlyle himself, they were remarkable for " their brotherly 
affection and coherence; for their hard sayings and hard 
strikings." When such a granite stock produces a genius 
— a man that can speak for it — we may look for origi- 
nality, a strong accent, an iron grip, and a stroke like that 
from a sledge-hammer. There is little in the outward 
events of Carlyle 's life that need detain us. In his child- 
ish years he led "not a joyful life," he tells us, "but a 
safe and quiet one." His home was the prudent, God- 
fearing household of the Scotch peasant; all the surround- 
ings wholesome, perhaps, but somewhat rigid and repress- 
ing. "An inflexible element of authority," Carlyle writes, 
"surrounded us all." He ran barefoot with his brothers 
and sisters, all younger than himself, in the street of Eccle- 
fechan; he was sent to the village school, and afterward to 
the grammar school at Annan, a town on the Solway Firth, 
some eight miles from home. His parents were proud of 
the ability he showed, and were anxious to fit him for the 
ministry of the Kirk, naturally the highest ambition of 
such a household; so at fourteen he entered the Univer- 
sity of Edinburgh, having walked the eighty miles that 
lay between Ecclefechan and the capital. He succeeded 
in obtaining a place as teacher of mathematics in the 
Annan Academy, and left the university in 1814, before 
taking his degree, to enter on his duties. In 1816 he gave 
up his post to become master of a school in Kirkcaldy. 
But the drudgery of teaching became intolerable, and a 
change in his religious views had forced him to abandon 
the idea of entering the ministry. In 1818 he took his 
little savings and settled in Edinburgh, where he began 
the study of the law. But he had not yet found his work. 
Law lectures proved indescribably dull to him, "seeming 



CARLYLE. 533 

to point toward nothing but money as wages for all that 
bog-post of disgust." 

Already dyspepsia, his lifelong tormentor, had fastened 
upon him. He knew that he was "the miserable owner 
of a diabolical arrangement called a stomach/' a bitter 
knowledge that never left him. These years of uncertain 
prospects and physical suffering were also a critical time 
of doubt, despair, and fierce spiritual conflict. He has 
told us in Sartor Resartus the story of this period of "mad 
fermentation," with its doubts of God, of the obligations 
of duty, of the reality of virtue. How he stood in those 
days of trial, "shouting question after question into the 
Sibyl-cave" and receiving for answer "an echo"; how he 
called out for Truth, though the heavens should crush him 
for following her; how he reached at length the appointed 
hour of deliverance when, in a mysterious flash of conver- 
sion, he came forth free, independent, defiant. 1 We must 
study this crisis of the spirit in the words of Carlyle him- 
self, remembering the intensity of his nature, his passion 
for probing things to the centre, his sincerity, his capacity 
for faith. 

Meanwhile Carlyle's aspirations had turned toward lit- 
erature, and he had contributed a number of articles to 
the Edinburgh Encyclopcedia. He also began to learn 
German, a study destined powerfully to affect his life and 
work. His German studies brought him into contact with 
a literature which seemed to reveal to him " a new heaven 
and a new earth." He became an enthusiastic student of 
Richter. His works give evidence of his absorption of the 
ideal philosophy of Fichte, and above all he came under 
the spell of Goethe. These studies did more than colour 
Carlyle's thought and help to produce the peculiar man- 
nerism and eccentricity of his style. There was at that 
time a furor for German literature, and the literary results 
of Carlyle's studies thus fortunately happened to fall in 
1 Sartor Resortix, Bk. ii. chap. viL 



534 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

with the popular demand. Thus in 1822 he contributed 
an article on Faust to the New Edinburgh Review; his 
translation of Goethe's WUhehn Meister appeared in 1824, 
his Life of Schiller, which had previously come out in the 
London Magazine, was published in book form in 1825, 
and his Specimens of German Romance in 1827. The 
year before the publication of the book last named he mar- 
ried Miss Jane Welsh, the daughter of a provincial surgeon 
of good family and of considerable local reputation. On 
her father's death Miss Welsh had inherited a small farm 
at Craigenputtock, in Dumfriesshire, and there Carlyle 
and his wife settled in 1828. The little farmhouse was 
set solitary in the midst of a somewhat dreary tract of 
moorland, and here, shut out from the world, Carlyle 
threw himself at work with characteristic intensity. He 
had left behind him the time of hackwork and transla- 
tions, and was reaching out toward something that should 
more truly represent him. He wrote a number of essays 
for the Edinburgh, among them his unapproachable study 

of Burns; and here he composed Sartor Resar- 
ReMirtus ^ us ' This extraordinary book contains the 

germ of Carlyle 's philosophy. His grievous 
uncertainties and hesitations were over. Much had been 
lived through to make this book, and into it Carlyle poured 
what he had gained, in good measure and running over. 
Carlyle's personality is always present in his writings, but 
never more strongly than here. Midway in this mortal 
life he delivered to us the deepest things that life and suffer- 
ing had taught him, the essence of his message. In Sar- 
tor Resartus, with its indescribable compound of grim 
humour, abruptness, tenderness, grotesqueness, broken by 
overpowering torrents of eloquence, Carlyle reveals him- 
self. It was his master passion to get at the heart of any 
object of thought, to tear away all the external and out- 
ward aspects through which any fact may reveal itself to 



CARLYLE. 535 

us, and, discarding everything superfluous and accidental, 
lay bare its underlying meaning. In his studies of men he 
does not rest at the outward events of their lives; he would 
lay hold of their very souls, and it is this which gives to his 
judgment such an extraordinary truth and value. In the 
same way he sees that in every case there is the outward 
form in which a fact becomes apparent to us, its body; 
and there is its soul, its inner meaning and reality. "It is 
the duty of every hero," he declares in a later book, "to 
bring men back to this reality," to force them to penetrate 
beneath the surface, to teach them "to stand upon things 
and not upon the shows of things." Sartor Resartus, or 
the tailor re-tailored, is the philosophy of clothes, that is, 
the vesture or symbols of things ; it aims to point us to the 
reality that underlies these outward forms or clothes, in 
which the underlying fact reveals itself. "Symbols are 
properly clothes — all forms whereby spirit manifests itself 
to sense, whether outwardly or in the imagination, are 
clothes; man's body is but his 'earthly vesture;' the uni- 
verse itself, with its manifold production and reproduction, 
is but the living garment of God." Through all the book 
spirit is recognized as the true and enduring reality. With 
Carlyle it is the things which are unseen that are eternal, 
and in this he stood in absolute opposition to the material 
and scientific element in his time. Human history itself 
is but the clothing of ideas in acts, and the great man, or 
hero, is but the highest human revelation of the will and 
spirit of God. 

In 1833 Sartor Resartus began to appear in Fraser's 
Magazine, finding but few readers among a bewildered or 
indifferent public. In the year following, Car- 
London." 1 We took a decisive step in leaving Craigenput- 
tock and settling in London. There he lived, 
during the forty-seven years that remained to him, in a 
house in Chelsea, which became the resort of many dis- 



536 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

tinguished men, and was thought of by many, says Pro- 
fessor Masson, "as the home of the real king of British 
letters." Up to this time Carlyle's life had been a stubborn 
fight with poverty. He had won recognition from the 
discriminating few; but he would write in his own way 
and in no other, and as yet he had gained nothing like a 
popular recognition. In a few years this was entirely 
changed. His popularity was begun by the appearance 
of his French Revolution, in 1837. About the same time 
he gave the first of several courses of lectures, which made 
his strange, rugged figure and impassioned earnestness 
familiar to London audiences. He "toiled terribly," 
bringing forth his great works with indescribable stress 
and effort. In 1866, shortly after he had fought his way 
through a mighty task — his Life of Frederick the Great — 
he was made Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh, 
a post of great honour. At last his own country had 
honoured her prophet, but the triumph was shattered by 
the sudden death of Mrs. Carlyle, "for forty years the true 
and loving helpmate of her husband." Fifteen years longer 
Carlyle himself lingered on; wandering about the Chelsea 
Embankment or Battersea Park, living over in an old 
man's dreams that past which he recorded in his Reminis- 
cences. Strength had altogether left him, and life was a 
weariness. He died, February 4, 1881, and was buried, 
according to his wish, beside his family in the little church- 
yard at Ecclefechan. 

With all deductions, Carlyle remains one of the most 
influential and considerable figures in the literature of his 

century. He stands in the midst of its noise 
work. 98 °f traffic, its haste to get rich, the prophet of 

the spiritual and the unseen. Wordsworth had 
protested against that "custom," that daily pressure of 
the trivial, which deadens the higher side of our nature, 
and "lies upon us like a weight." Carlyle helped men to 



CARLYLE. 537 

rid themselves of the burden of the petty and conven- 
tional, which was stunting the growth of their souls. He 
would have them do this, not by seeking refuge from the 
world of every day in some region of cloudy romance, but 
by realizing that, looked at rightly, this world of every 
day is essentially divine and miraculous. "Is not nature," 
he asks, "as eternal and immense in Annandale as she is 
at Chamouni? The chambers of the east are opened in 
every land, and the sun comes forth to sow the earth with 
orient pearl. Night, the ancient mother, follows him with 
her diadem of stars : and Arcturus and Orion call me into 
the infinitudes of space as they called the Druid priest or 
the shepherd of Chaldea." l 

And great as is this miracle called nature, still greater 
is the wonder of that miracle called man. As Carlyle was 
opposed to modern science in his conception of the phy- 
sical world, seeing in it a living divine revelation, and not 
a dead "world machine," he likewise became more and 
more at odds with that view of society which would re- 
gard it rather as a mechanism than as a living thing. He 
distrusted the democratic theories and reforms which 
marked his time. He sneered at the cry for "ballot boxes 
and electoral suffrages"; 2 believing that the saving of the 
world must come not through majorities, which were igno- 
rant or confused; not through institutions, which were 
likely to become mere hollow, ineffectual contrivances, 
but through the personal element, the hero, or great man, 
who had been, and must continue to be, the largest factor 
in history. With Carlyle there is no patent political re- 
ceipt for progress. He has no patience with that idea of 
history which regards human society as an organism 
developed according to fixed laws, an idea which reflects 
the scientific temper of our time. To him the history of 

1 Froude's Life, i. 244. Cf. passage on Miracles in Heroes and Hero 
Worship, lect. ii. 
3 Heroes and Hero Worship, fat* iv. 



538 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

the world is at bottom the history of the great men 
who have worked here. This intense individualism, as 
opposed to merely governmental authority, may seem 
to suggest Byron and Shelley, but one must remember 
that with Carlyle the few are to command, the many to 
obey. 

Without attempting to codify Cariyie's work into any 
set system, it is safe to say that a great proportion of it is 
Cariyie's closely related to this central theory of history, 
theory of In the Heroes and Hero Worship (1841) the 
importance of the great man in history is en- 
forced by a study of a series of heroes, representative of 
the different forms in which the hero has appeared. It 
aims to show that in all these cases the essential heroic 
qualities — earnestness, sincerity — have been the same. So 
the lives of Frederick the Great and of Cromwell are but 
more exhaustive studies of the great man as a historic 
factor. Cariyie's heroes were commonly taken from the 
strong men who had the power to compel the world to do 
their will. 'But we must not fall into the error of regard- 
ing him as a mere believer in brute strength. Right and 
might he believed were in the long run synonymous, not 
because might made right, but because in the large move- 
ment of history the strongest were ultimately the wisest, 
the most righteous. This thought of the ultimate tri- 
umph of right over wrong, and of strength over weakness, 
is the text of his French Revolution. The world is true 
and not a lie, and a sham government, grown too decrepit 
to govern, like that in eighteenth-century France, is a 
lie and cannot stand. Had the revolution failed to take 
place, Carlyle tells us, he would have despaired of the 
world. As it was, it demonstrated that though the mills 
of the gods grind slowly, injustice, misgovernment, and 
the sceptre of the strong in the hand of weakness, work 
at last the inevitable retribution. "Verily there is a 



CARLYLE. 539 

reward for the righteous, doubtless there is a God that 
judgeth the earth." 

We may differ in our estimate of the truth or value of 
Carlyle 's doctrines; we may be convinced that hero wor- 
ship is a vain dream, as a practical form of 
style 68 government in our modern society; but this 
need not at all interfere with our admiration 
for his books, as masterpieces of literary art. Carlyle's 
style is without parallel in the entire range of English 
prose. Often turgid and exclamatory, its lack of sim- 
plicity and restraint is relieved by a grim play of humor, 
or forgotten in the momentum of its terrific earnestness. 
Under all mannerisms we know that a strong man is 
speaking to us out of the depths of his soul, as one man 
seldom dares to speak to another in this solitary and con- 
ventional world. Its power is very different from that of 
mere literary dexterity. "I feel a fierce glare of insight 
in me into many things," Carlyle wrote in his Diary, "I 
have no sleight of hand, a raw, untrained savage, for every 
civilised man has that sleight." 1 His French Revolution 
having at length "got itself done" after incredible effort, 
Carlyle seems to fairly hurl it in the face of the public, 
which as yet would not know him. "You have not had 
for a hundred years," he thunders, "any book that comes 
more direct and flaming from the heart of a living man. 
Do with it what you like, you " 2 

This determination to speak what was in him to say, in 
his own fashion and without regard to any literary pre- 
cedent, is another of the many traits which Carlyle and 
Wordsworth have in common. Both belong in this to 
that revolt against the formalism of the Augustan Age, 
and to both "conventionality was the deadly sin." 

To the force of earnestness and unconventionality, Car- 
lyle added a phenomenal descriptive power. He had the 
x Froude's Carlyle, iii. p. 47. 2 Froude's Carlyle, 



540 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

poet's instinct for the picturesque and dramatic; by 
the intense concentration of his imaginative insight t the 

past is alive not only for him but for us also; 
power PtlV6 ne both sees an d makes us see. In his French 

Revolution, the "prose epic" of our century, 
the most dramatic episode in modern history has received 
its greatest interpretation in literature. The descriptions 
of the death of Louis XV., of the destruction of the Bas- 
tile, the twilight silence of a pastoral idyl after its noise 
and fury, of the flight and capture of the king — to find 
anything comparable to these and countless others like 
these, we must turn to the pages of our greatest poets. 
Or again, what can we find to set beside those pages in 
which the meaning and wonder of a great city are flashed 
on us, as though we had been suddenly caught up into 
the air and made to look down upon it with the compre- 
hensive and penetrative gaze of a god. 1 Carlyle, too, is 
one of the greatest of word portrait-painters. Read his 
description of the face of Dante, with its "deathless sor- 
row and pain"; of Rousseau's, with his "narrow contracted 
intensity, bony brows, deep, straight-set eyes." Read, 
too, those unsparing characterisations of his contempo- 
raries; they may be unfair, unjust, untrue, but what an 
instinctive and lavish power of characterisation they ex- 
hibit. Often carelessly uttered, and soon forgotten, every 
word goes home to its mark with the merciless power and 
precision of a well-directed javelin. 

And finally Carlyle 's style reflects his own humour and 
large-hearted tenderness; the pathetic gentleness of a 

strong, stern man who has suffered. It were 
ten?e°rnefs! better if we dwelt less on Carlyle 's grumblings 

and dyspepsia, his irritability, his half-humor- 
ous vituperations, and thought more of his unobtrusive 
acts of kindness and of the compassion that was in him. 
1 See Sartor Resartus, Bk. i. chap. iii. 



RUSKIN. 541 

Surely it is no common pity that goes out to us in such a 
passage as this: "Poor, wandering, wayward man! Art 
thou not tried, and beaten with stripes, even as I am? 
Ever, whether thou bear the Royal mantle or the Beg- 
gar's gabardine, art thou not so weary, so heavy-laden: 
and thy bed of Rest is but a grave. Oh, my Brother, my 
Brother! why cannot I shelter thee in my bosom, and wipe 
away all tears from thy eyes ! ,n 

Carlyle has helped his time not so much by the promul- 
gation of any definite system of philosophy, for in his 
teachings he is often open to the charge of inconsistency 
and exaggeration, but by the fresh inspiration he has 
brought to its higher life. He is a great writer, but above 
all he has been a spiritual force, quickening and invigor- 
ating the moral and religious life. His work is to be asso- 
ciated in this with that of John Ruskin (1819-1900), 
another great exponent of the highest ideals of 
' the century. In Ruskin, much that was best in 
Victorian life, thought, and art was combined and stamped 
with the seal of his own aggressive and dogmatic person- 
ality. On the right hand or on the left, he touched or 
supplemented one or another of our great modern guides, 
rising at the same time distinct from them all in his own 
work and character. Like Keats he was exquisitely re- 
sponsive to beauty, and came as her priest and her 
revealer. In all his work as art critic, in his life-long 
efforts to coax or scourge an obdurate British public to a 
more general and genuine love of beautiful things, he 
touched at one point the aesthetic element of the age. 
Like Wordsworth, he is the lover and interpreter of 
Nature, doing for her in his prose a work similar to that 
which Wordsworth and the other great Nature-poets per- 
formed in verse. And like Carlyle, Ruskin was a preacher 
and prophet to his generation; not rapt, like Keats, in 
1 Sartor Resartus, Bk. ii, chap. ix. 



542 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

aesthetic delights ; not wholly withdrawn, as Wordsworth, 
into the contemplation of nature, he threw himself into 
the noisy strifes and dissensions of his time, going among 
the crowds of the market-place to warn, to rebuke, and 
so far as he could, to help and to restrain. 

Nothing but a loving study of Ruskin's work can give 
us any conception of the wonder and loveliness of his 

prose-poetry of Nature. Here the exquisite sen- 
of e Nature. nS sibility of the landscape painter to colour and 

form is joined to the poet's gift of language, his 
guiding instinct in the choice of words; here, too, some- 
thing of the scientist's spirit toward the world of matter 
is tranfused and uplifted by the spiritual apprehension of 
the mystic. Ruskin's sense of colour is as glorious as Shel- 
ley's, his word-pictures often as luminous and as ethereal; 
indeed, so phenomenal is his descriptive power that he 
may be thought of as having created a new order of prose. 
Take, for instance, his description of the Rhone, and 
notice how alive it is with Ruskin's joy in colour and power; 
how the wonderful adjectives reveal his delight in the 
mighty river's crystalline purity and force. "For all 
other rivers there is a surface, and an underneath, and a 
vaguely displeasing idea of the bottom. But the Rhone 
flows like one lambent jewel; its surface is nowhere, its 
ethereal self is everywhere, the iridescent rush and trans- 
lucent strength of it blue to the shore, and radiant to the 
depth. Fifteen feet thick, of not flowing but flying water; 
not water, neither — melted glacier, rather, one should 
call it; the force of the ice is with it, and the wreathing of 
the clouds, the gladness of the sky, and the continuance of 
time." After a few sentences we come upon this bit of 
pure poetry: "There were pieces of wave that danced all 
day as if Perdita were looking on to learn; there were 
little streams that skipped like lambs and leaped like 
chamois; there were pools that shook the sunshine all 



RUSKIN. 543 

through them, and were rippled in layers of overlaid 
ripples, like crystal sand." 1 

Ruskin's descriptions of Nature affect us not merely 
because of their magical richness and flow of style; not 
because he piles up in them a shining structure of light 
and colour, but because to him, as to Wordsworth and 
Carlyle, the shows of earth and sky are far more than an 
empty pageant; because he, too, "sees into the life of 
things," 2 and reveals it to us. "External nature," he 
declares, "has a body and soul like a man; but her soul is 
the Deity." 3 And this doctrine that we are to regard 
Nature as the bodily or visible revelation of God, is not 
with Ruskin a mere philosophic theory ; it is remarkable for 
its vitality and definiteness, it is intimately connected with 
his principles of aesthetics, and makes beauty illustrative 
Ideas of °f ^ ne na ture of God. He belie ves we are so 
beauty made that, when we are in a cultivated and 

healthy state of mind, we must delight in beauty 
and be thankful. The apprehension of true beauty is, 
therefore, a test of our nearness to Him whom it expresses 
and reveals; and taste, the faculty by which this beauty is 
discerned and enjoyed, is, in its highest form, a moral or 
ethical quality. "The sensation of beauty is not sensual 
on the one hand, nor is it intellectual on the other, but is 
dependent on a pure, right, and open state of the heart, 
both for its truth and its intensity." Hence, in those 
attributes or qualities which enter into the beauty of 
Nature, Ruskin sees the types or symbols of " God's nature 
or of God's laws "; in the infinity of Nature, Divine incom- 
prehensibility; in her unity, Divine comprehensiveness; in 
her repose, Divine permanence; in her symmetry, Divine 
justice; in her purity, Divine energy; "in her moderation, 

1 Prceterita, vol. i. chap. v. 

3 Wordsworth, Lines on Revisiting T intern Abbey, 

* Modern Painters. 



544 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

the type of government by law." i With these ideas of 
Nature and Beauty, Ruskin's principles of art are naturally 
connected. Just as the perception of Beauty is a moral 
attribute, so the interpretation of Beauty, which is the 
work of the artist, is likewise moral, the act of a pure soul. 
Perhaps Ruskin gives the clearest and briefest statement 
of this, his fundamental art principle, which has exposed 
him to endless ridicule and misunderstanding, in a para- 
graph in The Queen of the Air: "Of course art-gift and 
amiability of disposition are two different things; a good 
man is not necessarily a painter, nor does an eye for 
colour necessarily imply an honest mind. But great art 
implies the union of both powers; it is the expression, by 
an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is not there, we can 
have no art at all ; and if the soul — and a right soul, too — 
is not there, the art is bad, however dexterous." 2 On this 
principle of the foundation of great art in morality, all 
Ruskin's work as an art critic is built. He tells us, for 
example, that in all his work as a critic of architecture his 
aim has been, ." to show that good architecture is essentially 
religious — the production of a faithful and virtuous, not 
of an infidel and corrupted people." 3 These ideas of Rus- 
kin must be firmly grasped, because they are the keynote 
not only to his work, but to his life also, making his whole 
career consistent and intelligible. He is first of all a great 
moral, or rather a great Christian, teacher. English-born, 
he really belongs by descent to the land of Knox and Car- 
lyle, and' religious earnestness, the passion to convert, to 
dogmatise, and to reform, go even deeper with him than 
his love of beauty. Like Carlyle he was brought up on 

1 Modern Painters, vol. ii. pp. 263-319. 

2 Queen of the Air, § 106; cf. Sesame and Lilies, Of Kings' Treasuries, 
The Mystery of Life, and its Arts, §§ 105-106; v. also, contra, Symonde' 
Renaissance in Italy: Fine Arts, pp. 24-30. 

3 Crown of Wild Olive, Traffic. 



RUSKIN. 545 

the study of the Bible, reading it and committing long pas- 
sages in it to memory in daily Bible lessons at his mother's 
knee. While Keats was first of all the worshipper of 
beauty Ruskin was first of all the impulsive and passionate 
defender of convictions, the proselytiser and the knight- 
errant of unpopular truths. Shortly after his graduation 
from Oxford, he entered the lists in his Modern Painters 
(1st vol., 1843) as the champion of Turner, whose merit as 
one of the greatest landscape painters of all time had then 

received but scanty recognition. This work, 
Work^ although the outcome of a desire to vindicate 

the genius of Turner, far outgrew the limits of 
its original design, and became, as it progressed, a setting- 
forth in prose of unexampled splendour and purHy, of Rus- 
kin's theory of art. He contends for faithfulness to the 
object portrayed; he would have the painter go himself to 
Nature, " rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorn- 
ing nothing." This last saying is worthy of our especial 
regard, because it shows us that Ruskin's teaching but 
carries that love of truth and sincerity which Wordsworth 
and Carlyle exemplified, into the sphere of art. Ruskin's 
advice may be set side by side with Wordsworth's trust 
that he has avoided false descriptions in his poems, because 
he has "at all times endeavoured to look steadily at 
the subject." To "look steadily at the subject" — this 
chance phrase of Wordsworth defines the nature of a 
change in the art, the poetry, and the life of the English 
world. 

For about twenty years from the publication of the first 
volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin gave his chief ener- 
gies to the study and criticism of art. The Seven Lamps 
of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, besides the con- 
cluding volumes of the Modern Painters, are among the 
works of this time. But from about 1860, while Ruskin's 
deepest interests and purposes remained unchanged, his 



546 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

best effort was given to ethics and social reform. In his 
loving study of nature, art, and beauty, the cry of his 
century would not let him rest; the thought of the sordid 

ugliness of the world about him, of the suffer- 
Beformer. ^ n § s > ^ ne P r °blems of humanity, beset him, and 

he would not put them by. "I am tormented," 
he wrote, " between the longing for rest and lovely life, and 
the sense of the terrific call of human crime for resistance, 
and of human misery for help." In order to answer this 
call, Ruskin must leave his chosen sphere of work, and 
face a new task. He must attack, single-handed, the deep 
seated evils, the cherished prejudices of modern England, 
the very law by which it lived. Yet the call was answered, 
and whatever may be thought of the wisdom or practical 
value of Ruskin's economic doctrines, we cannot but feel 
a glow of honest admiration, on seeing his ardour, his 
audacity, his purity of purpose, realising as we must the 
greatness of his foe. Great as this break in Ruskin's life 
seems, from art to social science, in reality the work of his 
second period was the consistent and logical consequence 
of his first. For twenty years he had laboured for the cause 
of pure art, and the conviction had but grown stronger in 
him that pure art was the outcome of a just, pure, and 
believing community. He believed that it was idle to 
preach the love of art and of beauty to a nation whose 
standards of living were vulgar and dishonest, whose real 
worship was the worship of wealth and worldly success. 
To promote the cause of art, it became necessary to secure, 
by the establishment of nobler and truer ideals of living, 
that moral soundness out of which pure art is produced. 
Ruskin was thus brought by a different route to face those 
same insistent questions which had enlisted the efforts of 
Carlyle, of Maurice, and of Kingsley; questions which yet 
press upon us unanswered. 
The industrial changes of the last hundred years had 



RUSKIN. 547 

brought not only an enormous increase of wealth, but had 
given new chances of acquiring it to people of almost every 
social class. The early part of the eighteenth century had 
witnessed the rise of the merchant class through the expan- 
sion of the colonial trade; the latter part of the century saw 
the rise of the manufacturing class. With golden prizes 
dangling before their eyes, the energies of the great mass 
of men had become more and more exclusively material. 
In their haste to get rich, men became more selfish and 
grasping; they were impelled to forget mercy and pity, 
The iove of money thus became more and more the great 
temptation of the modern world. We have watched the 
growth of the new love of Nature; Nature's fairest scenes 
were scored by railroads and scorched and blackened by the 
soot and grime of factories. We have watched the growth 
of a new pity for man. In the early part of Ruskin's 
century, men, women, and little children were sacrificed to 
Mammon by labour in mills and factories so prolonged and 
severe that it stunted and twisted their miserable bodies 
and darkened their miserable souls. 1 When Ruskin began 
work as an economist many of these evils had indeed been 
removed, but the master passion of the age remained un- 
changed. This modern spirit has been often assailed, but 
no protest has been more direct and momentous than that 
of Ruskin. To discuss, or even to state, his economic 
theory, set forth in such books as Unto This Last (1862), 
the Crown of Wild Olive (1866), Time and Tide (1868), or 
Fors Clavigera (begun 1871), papers addressed to the work- 
ingmen of England, would take us beyond our proper limit. 
It may be said briefly that it is essentially an attempt to 
apply the ethical teachings of Christianity to the actual 
conduct of business and government. The competition 
on which the whole structure of our society is founded, 

1 See Gibbins' Indust. History of England, for account of passage of 
factory laws. 



548 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

Ruskin declares to be "a law of death/ ' to be set side by 
side with anarchy in its destructive power. The true 
foundations of a state are not liberty, but obedience; not 
mutual antagonism, but mutual help. 1 From the stand- 
point of the literary critic, the books in which these strange 
doctrines are unfolded are substantial additions to English 
prose. In the Modern Painters, and other early books, 
Ruskin had proved himself master of a style unprecedented 
in its wealth of poetry and beauty, but in these later books 
all adornment is severely subordinated to the strong 
utterance of the thought. The power of using what he 
called " pleasant language" had not, indeed, passed away, 
but we can perceive that a growing weight of thought and 
earnestness has brought a greater plainness and directness 
of speech. If Ruskin's later style lost something in pure 
beauty, it gained in simplicity, in intensity, in pure power. 
There is, as in the Fors Clavigera, directness, tenderness, 
strong outbursts of denunciation and scorn, with an under- 
tone of satiric humour that recalls the power, but not the 
malignity, of Swift. 

John Henry Newman (1801-1890), stands apart from 

the other great prose-writers of his century, in his life, his 

strongly marked and impressive personality, 

Newman. n * s work, and his aims. Newman was above all 

a theologian. In his most familiar hymn " Lead, 

kindly Light/' he asks for Divine guidance, and his work is 

largely the expression of his spiritual quest, his intellectual 

struggles and inward experiences, or it is prompted by his 

desire to combat and confute a public indifferent or hostile 

to him or to his cause. His most famous book, the Apologia 

pro Vita Sua (1864) is a record of his spiritual experiences. 

In it he " spoke out," as he said, his "own heart/' talking 

to us at times very simply and directly as though he were 

confiding in us as in a friend. Newman's books are thus a 

1 Modern Painters, vol. v. p. 205. 



NEWMAN. 549 

part of his life history. They are partial revelations of an 
extraordinary man. 

The chief events of Newman's career were merely the 
outward results of that inner life of spiritual warfare and 
change which so absorbed him. Educated at Oxford, 
Newman began his work as a clergyman of the Church of 
England. For a time he was a leading spirit in a concerted 
effort, begun at Oxford in 1833, to make the English church 
more spiritual, and to bring it closer in doctrine and prac- 
tice to the Church of the early and mediaeval times. But 
while he taught others, Newman's own views were changing, 
and he soon began to think differently from his own follow- 
ers. In 1843 he resigned his office as Vicar of St. Mary's near 
Oxford, and two years later, after vain efforts to find some 
"middle way," he found in the Roman Catholic Church "a 
home after many storms." In 1849 he founded a brother- 
hood, or monastic retreat, at Edgbaston, near Birmingham, 
and there the long remainder of his life was chiefly passed. 
He was made Cardinal in 1879, and died at Edgbaston 
Oratory in 1890. 

Newman resembles some mediaeval saint and ascetic 
mysteriously transported into the midst of our practical, 
scientific, and unbelieving modern world. Born only a year 
later than Macaulay, Newman was an alien and a pilgrim 
in that England which Macaulay regarded with complacent 
satisfaction. His life was lonely; he had friends but they 
came "unasked and unhoped" for. A man of searching, 
subtle intellect, a master of irony, a keen and dangerous 
disputant, he had yet the soul of the poet, with a deep 
reserve of tenderness and pity. The weight of the world's 
misery, coldness, and unbelief, pressed heavily upon him. 
He was passionately, almost fiercely, religious, and to him 
the things which were real were the things which were not 
seen. 

Newman is among the greatest masters of English prose, 



550 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

by the transparent clearness, the ease, beauty, and singular 
persuasiveness of his style. His prose is remarkable for the 
variety of its excellence. He could be plain, almost homely 
and colloquial, delicately ironic, eloquent, passionate, or 
pathetic. There is no sense of strain or effort, his sentences 
seem to flow from him with that ease which accompanies 
great power But we feel, above all, that he is using this 
power over words, not for the pure pleasure of it, not to 
achieve certain artistic results, but always as a means and 
never as an end. He said of himself, "I think I have never 
written for writing's sake/' and we are sure that, unlike some 
modern artists in words, Newman made style the servant 
of his purpose, that his end was not to please with rare or 
beautiful phrases, but to get his meaning into the mind of 
his reader and persuade him to see as he sees. 

From the technical or special nature of his subjects, 
Newman's work often lacks that broad human interest 
which is usually characteristic of great literature. From 
the purely literary aspect this is a disadvantage which even 
the fine quality of his style cannot always entirely overcome. 
Such writers as Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Newman 
force us to realise the greatness of our modern literature in 
other prose the s P nere of prose. Since the time of Addison, 
writers: the English prose has steadily broadened in range 
istorians. and increased in literary importance. Carlyle, 
Ruskin, and Macaulay, were surrounded by many other 
prose writers some of them of great importance and dis- 
tinction; by scientists, scholars, historians, and literary 
critics, and by innumerable novelists who were busy supply- 
ing the rapidly increasing demand for works of fiction. 
The Victorian Age has probably surpassed any other period 
of English literature in the number and excellence of its 
historical writers, and in the importance of its contribu- 
tions to historical research. Some of this historical work is 
learned and important rather than brilliant, and its gains 



THE HISTORIANS. 551 

in accuracy have been offset in some cases by a loss of dra- 
matic power, picturesqueness, and literary charm. Henry 
Hallam (1777-1859), the father of Tennyson's chosen 
friend, was one of the most laborious and best equipped of 
the earlier historians; George Grote (1794-1871) wrote 
a monumental History of Greece (12 vols. 1846-1856); 
Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868), a History of Latin 
Christianity (1854-1856), and Alexander William King- 
lake (1809-1891) a brilliant and vivid account of the 
Invasion of the Crimea (1863-1887). 

A little after the middle of the century, several writers 
came into prominence who did much to increase our 
knowledge of English history, especially during the earlier 
period. Foremost among these were William Stubbs 
(1826-1901) and his friend Edward A. Freeman (1823- 
1892). Both were associated with Oxford, Freeman hav- 
ing succeeded his friend Stubbs (who was made a bishop 
in 1884) as Regius Professor of modern history in that 
university. Freeman was a profuse and often discursive 
writer, but he gave a marked impetus to historical study. 
His History of tlie Norman Conquest (1867-1876) is one of 
his best known works. Bishop Stubbs was among the 
foremost of this group of students who were enlarging 
and correcting men's understanding of the past by their 
patient and minute study of the original authorities. His 
Constitutional History of England (1874-1878) treats of the 
origin of the nation's government, and follows the growth 
of the English constitution from its obscure beginnings to 
the accession of Henry VIII. John Richard Green (1837- 
1883), the friend and, to some extent, the disciple of Freeman 
and Stubbs, added to a well-directed industry a singular 
breadth of view, and the grace of a smooth, animated, and 
sometimes eloquent style. Green was a London curate 
with a fondness for historical and antiquarian research. 
Compelled by failing health to give up his parish, he turned 



552 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

to his favourite studies, and after five years published his 
Short History of the English People (1874). Probably no 
English history since Macaulay's had been received with 
such enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic, and probably 
no book since Macaulay's has done so much to make the 
past of England alive and real to the imagination of the 
general reader. Green's books on English history are 
inspired by a deep patriotism, and a sympathetic under- 
standing of man. He is the historian " not of Kings or Con- 
quests, but of the English People." His object is to enter 
into and depict the life of the whole nation through all its 
centuries of continuous evolution; to exhibit each factor in 
progress, each element of change, in its proper relations 
and in due proportion; to slight no social class from king 
to churl, to neglect neither economics nor law, neither wars 
nor literature. Green has succeeded as no other has done 
in this seemingly impossible task. He has "set Shakes- 
peare among the heroes of the Elizabethan Age, and placed 
the scientific inquiries of the Royal Society side by side with 
the victories of the New Model." * Among Green's distin- 
guished contemporaries in his historical writing were 
James Gairdner, the greatest authority on the troubled 
period of the Civil Wars and Protectorate, Mandell 
Creighton, James Bryce, the author of The American 
Commonwealth, W. E. H. Lecky, the historian of the 
eighteenth century, and John Robert Seeley. One great 
master of the art of historical narrative remains to be 
noticed, — James Anthony Froude (1818- 
1894). This brilliant and forcible writer had 
little in common with the Dryasdust historians of the 
modern scientific school. He did not write history in the 
spirit of the scientist, who makes it his chief business to 
observe and accurately report facts, he wrote it in the spirit 
of the literary artist, with an instinctive feeling for dramatic 
1 Short History of the English People. Preface to the first ed. 



FROUDE. 553 

effects. In science, the important matter is, after all, the 
fact, not the observer of the fact; in the arts, the all-import- 
ant thing is the personality of the artist, — ■ the man who 
shows us life or nature as it appears to him. Froude did 
not believe that history was a science. He felt that it was 
difficult, probably impossible, to reach the absolute truth 
about the past. The historian, according to this view, is 
bound to have opinions ; he is forced to tell the story as he 
is able to interpret the facts. Froude's most important 
work, the History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the 
defeat of the Spanish Armada, appeared between 1856 and 
1870. The lucidity and picturesqueness of its style, and 
its dramatic power in the portrayal of character, made it 
widely popular, but it was fiercely attacked by Freeman 
and others on the score of inaccuracy. Repeated assaults 
have certainly impaired the public confidence in Froude's 
fairness and reliability, but whatever may be his short- 
comings as a scientific historian, there is no dispute about 
his eminence as a man of letters. One would as soon 
call the constitutional histories of Hallam and Stubbs 
romantic as pronounce Froucle dull. Froude, like Macau- 
lay and Carlyle, belongs to literature, and his place as 
one of the great prose writers in an age of great prose is 
secure. 

During this period a great amount of force was ex- 
pended on the study of literature and literary criticism. 
The names of such leading critics as Theodore Watts- 
Dunton, Frederick Harrison, Walter Pater, John 

Literary ADDINGTON SyMONDS, EDWARD DoWDEN, and 

criticism: Leslie Stephen, will occur to every reader. 
Arnold* Among such writers Matthew Arnold (1822- 
1888) occupies a high and peculiarly representa- 
tive place. Arnold was the son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the 
great headmaster of Rugby, and both his father and grand- 
father were clergymen of the Church of England. He was 



554 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

thus rooted and grounded in faith both by inheritance and 
early influences. But from these deeply religious surround- 
ings of his boyhood, Arnold was plunged at Oxford into the 
the midst of that conflict of beliefs and no-beliefs, that jar 
of doubt and speculation, which marked a time of spiritual 
crisis. At Oxford, indeed, there were " great voices in the 
air," ? the voice of Newman, pleading for a solution of all 
doubt by simple faith, a solution which Arnold afterward 
declared, "to speak frankly," was " impossible." * Arnold, 
who had thus abruptly passed from the shelter of his 
father's influence into the heat of the conflict of his time, 
seems to have had a certain power to sympathise alike with 
the teachings of Rugby and the doubts of Oxford. His 
nature had a positive and emotional, perhaps even a reli- 
gious strain, but this ran through a temperament austerely 
and coldly intellectual. Emotionally he apparently felt 
the need of faith, but his intellect, as hard and keen as 
highly tempered steel, was inexorable in its demands for 
exact demonstration, for precision and lucidity of thought. 
A great part' of Arnold's poetry is the reflection of this 
inward conflict between these incompatible elements in his 
nature. He looks backward with regret and longing, while 
he suffers himself to be borne along on the relentless current 
of his time. In his prose he rebukes, or reasons, or criti- 
cises, he builds up systems of conduct; but there remains 
within him a void which neither his sovereign remedy of 
"culture" nor any mere ethical system can fill. In his 
poetry he laments the loss of that which he discards, and 
half shrinks from conclusions which he feels constrained to 
accept. 2 

Yet we must not think of Arnold's poetry as a mere 
wail of regret or outburst of despair. On the contrary its 

1 Lecture on " Emerson, " in Discourses in America. 

2 Stanzas from The Grande Chartreuse. See the passage beginning 
"Wandering between two worlds," etc. 



ARNOLD. 555 

prevailing note is self-reliance; help must come from the 
soul itself, for 

" The fountains of our life are all within." 

He preaches fortitude and courage in the face of the 
mysterious and the inevitable — a courage indeed forlorn 
and pathetic enough in the eyes of some — and he con- 
stantly takes refuge in a kind of stoical resignation. He 
delights in showing us human sorrow, only to withdraw 
our minds from it by leading us to contemplate the infinite 
calm of Nature, beside which our transitory woes are 
reduced to a mere fretful insignificance. All the beautiful 
poem of Tristram and Iseult is built up on the skilful 
alternation of two themes. We pass from the feverish, 
wasting, and ephemeral struggle of human passion and 
desire, into an atmosphere that shames its heat and fume 
by an immemorial coolness and repose. 

Arnold's poetry has an exquisitely refined, finished, 
and delicate beauty; it reveals the critic, the thinker, 
and, above all, the man of a fine but exclusive culture. 
Set almost wholly in a single key, there are times when 
we weary of its persistent and pathetic minor. It is often 
coldly academic rather than warm with human life and 
passion, and we are apt to miss in its thin, intellectual 
atmosphere, just that large-souled and broadly human 
sympathy which it is difficult to associate with Arnold 
himself. At times, as in the fifth of the series entitled 
Switzerland, we feel under the exquisite beauty of the 
verses an unwonted throb of passion, and then, as in the 
poem last mentioned, we touch the highest point of Arnold's 
poetic art. 

In his work as literary critic, Arnold has occupied a 
high place among the foremost prose writers of the time. 
His style is in marked contrast to the dithyrambic elo- 
quence of Carlyle, or to Ruskin's pure and radiant 



556 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

colouring. It is a quiet style, restrained, clear, discrimi- 
nating, incisive, with little glow of ardour or passion. 

Notwithstanding its scrupulous assumption of 

urbanity, it is often a merciless style, inde- 
scribably irritating to an opponent by its undercurrent 
of sarcastic humour, and its calm air of assured superi- 
ority. By his insistence on a high standard of technical 
excellence, and by his admirable presentation of certain 
principles of literary judgment, Arnold performed a great 
work for literature. On the other hand, we miss here, as 
in his poetry, the human element, the comprehensive sym- 
pathy that we recognise in the criticism of Carlyle. Arnold's 
varied energy and highly trained intelligence have been felt 
in many different fields. He achieved a peculiar and 
honourable place in the poetry of the century; he was 
an excellent literary critic, he laboured in the cause of edu- 
cation, and finally, in Culture and Anarchy, St. Paul and 
Protestantism, and certain later books, he made impor- 
tant contributions to contemporary social and religious 
thought. 

In no direction has this development of prose been 
more remarkable than in that of the novel, the distinctive 

literary form of the modern world. Since the 
o^the^ovei publication of Richardson's Pamela, in 1740, 

the range of the novel has immensely broad- 
ened, and its importance as a recognised factor in our 
intellectual and social life has surprisingly increased. 
William Godwin (1756-1836) employed the novel as a 
vehicle of opinion. His Caleb Williams (1794) was one of 
the earliest of those novels with a purpose, of which there 
are so many examples in later fiction. Maria Edgeworth 
(1767-1849), the author of Castle Rackrent, The Absentee, 
Helen, and other novels, has been called the creator of the 
novel of national manners. By her pictures of Irish life 
she did somewhat the same service for that country that 



THE NOVEL. 557 

Scott, on a larger scale, was soon to perform for his beloved 
Scotland; she gave it a place in literature. To Scott, the 
unexampled popularity of the novel in modern times is 
largely due, and many writers in England, as well as Dumas 
in France, carried on his work in historical romance. Con- 
spicuous among Scott's literary descendants were G. P. R. 
James (1801-1860), who wrote about one hundred novels 
and stories, most of them historical, between 1825-1850; 
W. Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), an unequal, but at 
times a vigorous writer; and Edward Bulwer, Lord 
Lytton (1805-1873), who, after producing The Last Days 
of Pompeii (1834) and other historical romances, turned to 
the realistic treatment of modern life in The Caxtons (1845- 
1849) and My Novel (1853). But while some writers were 
producing romantic tales, full of moving adventures and 
marvellous escapes, others were endeavouring to present 
the more ordinary and prosaic aspects of modern life. 
Shortly before the appearance of Waverly, Jane Austen 
(1775-1817) had published Sense and Sensibility (1811), 
the first of her finished and exquisite pictures of the daily 
domestic life of the middle class. In these novels the ordi- 
nary aspects of life are depicted with the minuteness and 
fidelity of the miniature painter, while their charming and 
unfailing art saves the ordinary from becoming tiresome or 
commonplace. Miss Austen has found worthy successors, 
but no superior, in her chosen field. The Cranford of 
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1866) is a masterly study of 
the little world of English provincial life, as are the Chroni- 
cles of Carlingford of Margaret Oliphant (1820). Mrs. 
Gaskell is further remembered for work of a more tragic 
and powerful order than the quaint and pathetic humour 
of Cranford. Her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), laid 
bare before the reading world the obscure life and struggles 
of the poor who toiled in the great manufactories of 
Manchester. 



558 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, of Charles Kingsley 
(1849), the story of a London apprentice who becomes 
involved in the Chartist agitations, shows the same sym- 
pathetic interest in the heavy burdens of the poor, and in 
that unhappy antagonism between employer and employed 
which remains one of the unsettled problems of our 
time. 

But the life of the outcast and the poor has found its 
most famous if not its most truthful chronicler in Charles 
Dickens (1812-1870), one of the greatest novel- 
Dickens. ^ s °^ ^ ne e P ocn - Dickens was the second of 
eight children. His earliest associations were 
with the humbler and harsher side of life in a metropolis, 
as his father, John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay-office 
was transferred from Portsmouth to London in 1814. The 
knowledge thus hardly gained through early struggles and 
privations, became a storehouse from which Dickens drew 
freely in his later work. The Marshalsea Prison, where 
John Dickens was confined for debt, is described in Little 
Dorrit. David's experiences as a wine merchant's appren- 
tice in David Copperfield, the most autobiographical of the 
novels, may have been suggested by Warren's blacking 
factory, where Dickens worked as a boy; while Dickens' 
youthful struggles with shorthand and reporting are 
reflected in Copperfield's later history. Remembering the 
great novelist's early experience, it seems but natural that 
he should have chosen to let in the sun and air on some of 
the shabbier and darker phases of existence; depicting 
types of many social gradations ; obscure respectability, the 
vagrants and adventurers in the outer circles of society, 
down, as in Oliver Twist (1837-1838), to the pick-pocket 
and the murderer. There is Jo, the London street waif 
of Bleak House (1852-1853), "allers a-movin' on"; Jingle, 
the gay and voluble imposter of Pickwick (1836-1837); 
and that questionable fraternity, the Birds of Prey, that 



DICKENS. 559 

flit about the dark places of the Thames in Our Mutual 
Friend (1864-1865). Through this portrayal of the under 
strata of society there runs a strong, perhaps a sometimes 
too apparent moral purpose; yet take us where he will, 
Dickens' art is always pure, sound, and wholesome. 

It is as a humorist that Dickens is at his best. There is a 
whimsical and ludicrous extravagance in his humour, an 
irresistible ingenuity in the ridiculous, peculiar to him 
alone. From the time when a delighted people waited in 
rapturous impatience for the forthcoming number of 
Pickwick, to the publication of the unfinished Edwin 
Drood (1870), nineteenth century England laid aside her 
weariness and her problems to join in Dickens' overflow- 
ing, infectious laughter. When we are ungrateful enough 
to be critical of one who has rested so many by his genial 
and kindly fun, we must admit that Dickens was neither a 
profound nor a truthful interpreter of life and character. 
His is for the most part a world of caricature, peopled 
not with real living persons, but with eccentricities and 
oddities, skilfully made to seem like flesh and blood. 
We know them from some peculiarity of speech or man- 
ner, some oft-repeated phrase; they are painted from 
without; we are rarely enabled to get inside of their lives 
and look out at the world through their eyes. The result 
is often but a clever and amusing burlesque of life, not 
life itself. It may also be admitted that we feel at times, 
in Dickens, the absence of that atmosphere of refinement 
and cultivation which is an unobtrusive but inseparable 
part of the art of Thackeray. Without detracting from 
some famous and beautiful scenes, Dickens' pathos is 
often forced and premeditated, his sentiment shallow, 
while there are heights from which he is manifestly shut 
out. When he attempts to draw a gentleman or an aver- 
age mortal distinguished by no special absurdities, the 
result is apt to be singularly insipid and lifeless. Not- 



560 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

withstanding these shortcomings, Dickens has won nota- 
ble successes outside the field of pure humour. His Tale 
of Two Cities (1859) is a powerful story, quite different 
from his usual manner, and many scenes throughout his 
other books, as the famous description of the storm in 
David Copperfield, are triumphs of tragic power. 

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was the 
keen but kindly satirist of that surface world of frivolity and 
William fashion into which the art of Dickens so seldom 
Makepeace penetrates. Thackeray was born at Calcutta, 
Thackeray, j^ wag ^^ gen ^. ^ o England for his educa- 
tion. He had something of that regular training which 
Dickens lacked, going to Cambridge from the Charter- 
house School in London. He left college, however, shortly 
after entering, to study art on the Continent, and finally, 
losing his money, he returned to England, and about 
1837 drifted into literature. After writing much for peri- 
odicals, he made his first great success in Vanity Fair 
(1847-1848). In this book, under its satiric and humor- 
ous delineation of a world of hollo wness and pretence, 
runs the strong current of a deep and serious purpose. 
"Such people there are," Thackeray writes, stepping 
"down from the platform," like his master, Fielding, to 
speak in his own person — " such people there are living 
and flourishing in the world — Faithless, Hopeless, Char- 
ityless; let us have at them, dear friends, with might and 
main. Some there are, and very successful, too, mere 
quacks and fools; and it was to combat and expose such 
as these, no doubt, that laughter was made." 1 

The passage is better than any outside comment on the 
spirit of Thackeray's work. Only the shallow and undis- 
criminating reader fails to see that Thackeray's serious- 
ness is deeper and more vital than his cynicism; that 
though the smile of the man of the world is on his lips, 

1 Vanity Fair, vol. i. chap. viii. 



THACKERAY. 561 

few hearts are more gentle, more compassionate, more ten- 
der; that though he is quick to scorn, few eyes have looked 
out on this unintelligible world through more kindly or 
more honest tears. Satirist as he is, he kneels with the 
genuine and whole-souled devotion of Chaucer, of Shakes- 
peare, and of Milton, before the simple might of innocence 
and of goodness. In the midst of this world of Vanity 
Fair, with its pettiness, its knavery, and its foolishness, he 
places the unspoiled Amelia and the honest and faithful 
Major Dobbin. If in Pendennis we have the world as it 
looks to the idlers in the Major's club windows, we have 
also Laura, and "Pen's " confiding mother, apart from it, 
and unspotted by its taint. But more beautiful than all 
other creations of Thackeray's reverent and loving nature, 
is the immortal presence of Colonel Newcome, the man 
whose memory we hold sacred as that of one we have loved 
— the strong, humble, simple-minded gentleman, the 
grizzled soldier with the heart of a little child. In such 
characters, Thackeray, too, preaches to us, in his own 
fashion, the old lesson dear to lofty souls, that 

" Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt: 

Surprised by unjust force but not enthralled." l 

So he reenforces Scott's dying injunction to Lockhart: 
"Be a good man, my dear," by showing us, in the corrup- 
tion of much that is mean and vile, that beauty of holiness 
which can 

"redeem nature from the general curse," 

that fair flower of simple goodness which, blossoming in 
tangled and thorny ways, sweetens for us the noisome 
places of the earth. 

In addition to his work as painter of contemporary 
manners, Thackeray has enriched the literature by two 
remarkable historical novels, Henry Esmond (1852), and 

1 Milton's Comus, p. 281, supra. 



562 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

its sequel, The Virginians (1857-1859). In the first of 
these we have the fruits of Thackeray's careful and loving 
study of eighteenth century England, a period with which 
he was especially identified, and which he had treated 
critically with extraordinary charm and sympathy in his 
Lectures on the English Humorists (published 1853). Es- 
mond is one of the greatest, possibly the greatest historical 
novel in English fiction. The story is supposed to be 
told by Esmond himself, and the book seems less that of a 
modern writing about the past than the contemporary 
record of the past itself. Nothing is more wonderful in it 
than the art with which Thackeray abandons his usual 
manner to identify himself with the narrator he has 
created. Yet in this, perhaps, we should rather see the 
real, tender-hearted Thackeray, his thin veil of cynicism 
thrown aside. 

Thackeray's style is exceptionally finished and charm- 
ing; light, graceful, and incisive, it places him among the 
greatest prose masters of English fiction. 

So many able and distinguished writers of the Victorian 
period employed the novel as their favourite or exclusive 
form of literary expression, and so familiar is their work, 
that even a mere enumeration of them is here both impos- 
sible and unnecessary. Their works, with that of count- 
less others whose books represent every shade of merit or 
demerit, and reproduce almost every ripple of thought or 
discussion, are among the best-known influences of our 
modern life. 

Among the many women who have gained distinction as 
writers of fiction since the appearance of Miss Burney's 
Evelina (1778), one at least cannot be passed over, even in 
the briefest survey. 

Mary Ann, or Marian Evans (George Eliot) was born 
November 22, 1819, at South Farm, Arbury, a " small, low- 
roofed farmhouse " in Warwickshire. Her father, George 



GEORGE ELIOT. 563 

Evans, was agent to Sir Roger Newdigate, of Arbury 

Hall, within the boundaries of whose estate the farm lay. 

„. x Arbury Hall is in the northeastern corner of the 
George Eliot. J 

county, some thirty miles from Stratford. It 

lies in the same rich and well-watered region that nour- 
ished the youth of Shakespeare; a sleepy, abundant land, 
prosperous, and steeped in drowsy centuries of quiet. In 
some part of this rich Midland district, at Griff House, near 
Nuneaton, at school in Coventry, or at Foleshill on its out- 
skirts, the first thirty-two years of George Eliot's life were 
passed. She was identified with its local interests by 
birth and by daily contact; her earliest and tenderest rec- 
ollections clustered round it, and the grace of its liberal 
beauty, sanctified by memory, remained with her until the 
end. Her early surroundings, she tells us, 

" Were but my growing self, are part of me; 
My present Past, my root of piety." * 

This English provincial life, thus flowing in the very cur- 
rents of her blood, became the living material of her art. 
She was at once of it, and, by the greatness of her genius, 
apart from it; able both to depict it from within, and to 
feel it from without. Birth and association thus qualified 
her to become its great painter, as emphatically as Dickens 
was the great painter of the slums and of the poor, or Thack- 
eray of the London clubs and drawing-rooms. The rural 
or provincial background which is the setting of so many 
of her stories is painted from reality, and many of her best- 
known characters were drawn from or suggested by the 
Warwickshire people she had early known and loved. 

Ordinary and uneventful as these early years in War- 
wickshire may seem at first, careful study will bat 
strengthen our conviction of their importance in determin- 

1 Poems, Brother and Sister, 



564 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

ing the broad character of her art. In a poem full of ten- 
der memories, in which she describes her early rambles 
with her brother, she lets us share the secrets of her child- 
hood. 

" He was the elder, and a little man 

Of forty inches, bound to show no dread, 
And I the girl that puppy-like now ran, 
Now lagged behind my brother's larger tread. 



If he said ' Hush! ' I tried to hold my breath; 
Wherever he said 'Come,' I stepped in faith." 1 

In The Mill on the Floss, in Maggie Tulliver's dim longings 
and spiritual growing-pains, we gain an insight into those 
years in which, with much stress and hunger of the spirit, 
the childish horizon widened. At sixteen George Eliot 
lost her mother and left school to keep house for her father, 
gaining some experience of farm-life which she afterward 
used in her description of the Poyser household in Adam 
Bede (1859). In 1841 she became intimate with a family 
named Bray, wealthy people who lived in the vicinity of 
Coventry, and under their influence abandoned forever her 
faith in Christianity as a divine revelation, seeing in it only 
a human creation of man's hopes and needs. Her nature, 
though prone to speculation, was by no means wanting in 
religious feeling, and the comparative suddenness of her 
loss of faith may impress us as unaccountable. In think- 
ing of this we should remember her peculiar disposition. 
With all her masculine strength and activity of intellect, 
she was singularly susceptible to influence, and dependent 
to an unusual degree upon the help and encouragement of 
others. Strength of mind does not necessarily imply 
strength of character, although we are too apt to confuse 
the two, and this fact will help us to understand more than 
one incident in George Eliot's life. From the first her tastes 

1 Brother and Sister. 



GEORGE ELIOT. 565 

had been distinctly studious and scholarly, and in 1846 she 
began her literary career by translating a German work in 
harmony with the skeptical ideas she had adopted. Her 
home was broken up by her father's death in 1849, and 
two years later, after a short Continental tour, she settled 
in London as assistant editor of The Westminster Review, 
to which she had already contributed. Her Warwickshire 
life was over, and, like Shakespeare when he first turned 
his face toward London, she stood at the entrance to a new 
world. The Westminster Revieio numbered Herbert Spen- 
cer, James and Harriet Martineau, and many other dis- 
tinguished writers among its contributors, and George 
Eliot's connection with it naturally gave her a place in 
literary circles. 

Among others she met Mr. George Henry Lewes, a dis- 
cursive, brilliant, but somewhat erratic writer, who com- 
bined keen literary sympathies with a distinctly scientific 
and philosophical bent. A deep attachment grew up 
between them, but marriage was impossible, as Mr. Lewes' 
wife, from whom he was separated, was still alive, and 
through a technicality of the law a divorce could not be 
obtained. Believing the law unjust, George Eliot entered 
in 1854 upon a union with Mr. Lewes, which under all 
the circumstances, she regarded as a true marriage. Mr. 
Lewes, while not a deep thinker, was a man of wide intel- 
lectual interests. He was a journalist, writer, essayist, 
dramatist, and novelist, and George Eliot felt the influ- 
ence of his alert and stimulating mind. It was at his sug- 
gestion that she turned from her distinctly scholarly and 
critical labours as essayist and translator to begin that 
work in fiction on which her fame mainly rests. Here- 
tofore her writing had represented chiefly the scholarly 
side of her mind ; it had been the outcome of her studies of 
books. Now, under Mr. Lewes' encouragement, the other 



566 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

side of her genius declared itself by the publication in 
Blackwood of her first story, Scenes of Clerical Life ; The 
Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton (January, 1857). 
This sudden transference of energy into a totally new chan- 
nel is one of the most surprising incidents of our literary 
history. From one aspect it is by no means without par- 
allel: Scott abandoned poetry for romance writing; De Foe 
at sixty turned from journalism and pamphleteering and 
produced Robinson Crusoe. But the singularity in George 
Eliot's case is not that at thirty-eight she discovered within 
her a great gift that she had never dreamed herself pos- 
sessed of, it is that it was left for another to make this dis- 
covery for her; that this critical change in her career was 
due not to an impulse from within, but to an influence from 
without. Thus again, as at the time of her contact with 
the Brays, we are impressed by her extreme dependence on 
others. From this "new era " in her life, as George Eliot 
called it, we are chiefly occupied in noticing the develop- 
ment of this strangely discovered gift, and in marking the 
establishment and growth of her fame. Adam Bede, her 
first long story, and one of the most powerful and sponta- 
neous of her books, appeared in 1859, and it was felt "that 
a new power had arisen in English letters." Adam Bede 
was followed by masterpiece after masterpiece at intervals 
of one, two, or three years; thoughtful books of substantial 
workmanship, not fluently written, with Scott's easy joy 
in power, but with unspeakable effort, self-discipline, and 
toil. The Spanish Gypsy (1868), a dramatic poem, marked 
a new literary departure, but George Eliot's poetry, though 
thoughtful and mechanically correct, is distinctly inferior 
to her prose. Mr. Lewes died in 1878, and barely two 
years later the world was electrified by the news of George 
Eliot's marriage to a young London banker, Mr. John 
Walter Crfcss. At this time George Eliot was slightly over 
sixty and Mr. Cross some twenty years her junior. When 



GEORGE ELIOT. 567 

the intensity of her devotion to Mr. Lewes is taken into 
account we are inclined to regard this second marriage as 
but another proof that George Eliot's nature was depend- 
ent rather than self-reliant. "In her moral development/' 
writes Mr. Cross, "she showed from her earliest years the 
trait that was most marked in her all through life, namely, 
the absolute need of some one person who should be all in 
all to her, and to whom she should be all in all." In the 
fall of 1880 her health was failing, and in December of 
that year she died suddenly after a brief illness. 

George Eliot stands easily in the front rank of English 
novelists; she must, moreover, be recognised as one of the 

most influential and distinctly representative 
a8 e ^ e eli8t ot writers of her time. Whatever views we may 

hold of the true scope and purpose of fiction 
as an art, we can hardly escape assigning to George Eliot's 
work a position of the highest significance and importance 
in the history of nineteenth century thought. The art of 
Thackeray may seem to us finer and less laboured ; we may 
miss in such a novel as Daniel Deronda that great mas- 
ter's half playful cynicism and exquisite lightness of touch. 
Scott's spontaneous, instinctive power of telling a story 
for the story's sake may appeal to us more strongly, the 
romantic twilight, the old-world enchantment of the Wav- 
erley Novels may bring us more of that blessed rest from 
the burdens of the day which we may consider it is the 
true purpose of the novel to bestow. Yet, whatever we may 
find or miss in George Eliot's novels, we must admit that 
they reveal to us a profound and tragically serious student 
of life. Employing a literary form which, in less self- 
conscious and exacting days, was generally looked upon 
as a means of relaxation, George Eliot's place is rather 
with Ruskin, Darwin, Arnold, Browning, or Herbert 
Spencer, with "the teachers and seekers after light," the 
signs of trouble often written on their foreheads — than 



568 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

with Scott or Jane Austen, with Dickens or Wilkie Col- 
lins. Yet George Eliot is more than a thinker, precisely 
as Browning is more than a thinker; both are artists, and 
give us, not abstract doctrines, but a philosophy clothed 
in the language and embodied in the living forms of art. 
Both feel the burdens and obligations laid upon those who 
in our modern time think deeply or feel acutely, and 
both, in harmony with its analytic and questioning spirit, 
are constrained not only to depict but to moralise, to 
search into the motives and the consequences of conduct, 
to analyse the subtle constitution of the soul. But in this 
analysis George Eliot is an artist because she studies and 
interprets the soul not merely with her intellect but by 
her true human sympathy, by the intensity of her imagi- 
native understanding. A scholastic flavour hangs about 
some of our modern guides, as, for instance, Matthew 
Arnold, which proclaims them as primarily readers of 
books. George Eliot was a scholar, . but she was still 
more emphatically a student of life. It is life itself as she 
has seen it -and known it, in the farmhouse or the field, 
life in the formative experiences of her own soul, which 
affords her the material for her thought. "I have always 
thought," she writes, "that the most fortunate Britons 
are those whose experience has given them a practical 
share in many aspects of the national lot; who have lived 
among the mixed commonalty, roughing it with them 
under difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them, 
and getting acquainted with their notions and motives, 
not by inference, from traditional types in literature, or 
from philosophic theories, but from daily fellowship and 
observation." George Eliot herself was such a "fortu- 
nate Briton," and her work, like that of Shakespeare, of 
Burns, of Carlyle, and of Dickens, rests securely on her 
sympathetic understanding of the daily life of man. The 
truth of her insight into the most ordinary, and, as we 



GEORGE ELIOT. 569 

might consider them, commonplace lives, her tenderness 
for them, her perception of the pathos and the wonder 
of their narrow world, is one of the finest traits in her 
character and her art. In her earliest story, after telling 
us that the Rev. Amos Barton, whose fortunes she is 
describing, was "palpably and unmistakably common- 
place," she goes on to speak of commonplace people in 
words which may be taken as a text of all her work. The 
large majority of our fellow-creatures, she declares, are 
"simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose 
conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet 
these commonplace people — many of them — bear a 
conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the 
painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows and their 
sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards 
their first-born, and they have mourned over the irre- 
claimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very 
insignificance — in our comparison of their dim and nar- 
row existence with the glorious possibilities of that human 
nature which they share?'' * 

Here is that democratic spirit of human brotherhood 
of which we have so often spoken, uttering itself again 
through literature. Reflecting on these words we meas- 
ure again the distance that the England of Victoria had 
travelled from the England of Pope. It is not enough 
for us to appreciate that George Eliot shows us ordinary 
people under ordinary conditions; others have done this. 
Her distinction is that she feels and makes us feel a 
something in ordinary lives which before was not appar- 
ent. Perhaps when he looks into his own soul no man 
truly deems himself commonplace. George Eliot gives us 
such a glimpse into the souls of others. Hence her char- 
acters are substantial, living people, filling us with an 
intense sense of reality. Looking into our own lives we 
1 The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, chap. v. 



570 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

know that their secret vicissitudes are true. Such art is 
comparatively independent of plot and incident. In order 
to interest us in her characters George Eliot is not forced, 
as Dickens was, to depend upon outward eccentricities or 
cheat us into a conviction of reality by the minute accur- 
acy of the stage setting. In Tom and Maggie Tulliver, 
in Dorothea Brooke, in Tito Melema, or in Gwendolen 
Harleth, we enter into and identify ourselves with the 
inner experience of a human soul. These, and the other 
great creations of George Eliot's genius, are not set char- 
acters; like ourselves they are subject to change, acted 
upon by others, acting on others in their turn; moulded by 
the daily pressure of things within and things without. 
We are made to understand the growth or the degenera- 
tion of their souls; how Tito slips half consciously down 
the easy slopes of self-indulgence, or Romola learns 
through suffering to ascend the heights of self-renuncia- 
tion. This contrast between the human craving for hap- 
piness regardless of consequences, between the simple 
desire for pleasure so pathetically inherent in the young 
and undisciplined, and the stern obligation to sacrifice 
our pleasure to the common good, is eminently character- 
istic of George Eliot. She reiterates the hard lesson with 
inexorable earnestness, that the weakness which prompts 
us to thoughtless self-gratification is a wickedness which 
brings with it inevitable retribution. There are few 
downright villains in her books, but in almost every novel 
are characters that fail through selfishness or a weak 
inability to deny themselves the things that seem pleasant. 
Beside Tito Melema we naturally place the amiable and 
yielding Arthur Donnithorne, and in the same general 
group are Godfrey Cass, Grandcourt in his colossal and 
imperturbable egotism, and poor, desiccated Casaubon 
who, selfishly unconscious of the sacrifice, suffers Doro- 
thea's fresh and ardent womanhood to be immolated to 



GEORGE ELIOT. 571 

him and to his "Key to all Mythologies.' ' In Adam Bede 
is Hetty Sorel, with her soft, girlish beauty, "seeing noth- 
ing in this wide world but the little history of her own 
pleasures and pains"; in Felix Holt, Esther Lyon, whom 
Felix declares to be "no better than a bird trimming its 
feathers and picking about after what pleases it"; in 
Middlemarch, Rosamond Vincy, who, we are told, "would 
never do anything that was disagreeable to her"; and in 
Daniel Deronda, Gwendolin Harleth, set between Grand- 
court's selfishness and Deronda's self-sacrifice, "busy," at 
first, "with her small inferences of the way in which she 
could make her life pleasant." Contrasted with such 
characters, marring their own lives and those of others by 
their wrong ideas of life's purpose, are those who are 
strong enough with deliberate self-abnegation to choose 
"the painful right." Disciplined by suffering, their per- 
sonal griefs are merged in the peace that comes from 
self-surrender. Yet self-sacrifice is insisted on by George 
Eliot, not because of an earthly peace or a future reward; 
right-doing is often a hard thing; wrong-doing is often a 
pleasant and an easy thing; but "because right is right," 
we are to follow it "in scorn of consequence." Fedalma 
exclaims at the crisis of her fate : 

"Oh, all my bliss was in my love, but now 
I may not taste it ; some deep energy 
Compels me to choose hunger." 

Such a moral tone is both lofty and in the highest 
degree austere and uncompromising. Not only are the 
inexorable claims of duty constantly forced home to us, 
but in the performance of duty George Eliot recognised 
no divine helper; she is strengthened by no hope of a 
reward hereafter. The individual loses that the race may 
gain. As surely as Byron stood for individualism, hurling 
his maledictions against the universe because it would not 



572 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

permit him to enjoy, so George Eliot stood for altruism, 
teaching that the death of selfishness is our road and the 
world's road to progress and to peace. Such doctrines 
place her with the great moral teachers of her century, 
but render her books preeminently exacting and almost 
sombre. Her novels move under a heavy weight of tragic 
earnestness; admirable as is their art, graphic and telling 
as is their humour, they are weighed down with a burden 
of philosophic teaching which in the later books, especially 
Daniel Deronda, grows too heavy for the story, and injures 
the purely literary value. "My books," she writes, "are 
deeply serious things to me, and come out of all the 
painful discipline, all the most hardly learned lessons of 
my past life." From the literary aspect, perhaps Silas 
Marner is her most artistically perfect story, and Middle- 
march her greatest work. In the latter book, that hunger 
for an unattainable and far-off good, which George Eliot 
so frequently expresses, is set amid the stifling atmos- 
phere of modern society. Trying to sacrifice their lives 
to others, both Dorothea and Lydgate are caught in the 
mesh of circumstances, and fail. "There is no sorrow," 
Dorothea exclaims, "I have thought more about than 
that — to love what is good, to try to reach it, and fail." 
And Lydgate feels that in her words he has "found room 
for the full meaning of his grief." But quite aside from 
their teaching, it is the art of these great books — their 
poetic beauty of style, their subtle understanding of the 
lives of men and women — that places them with the 
great imaginative productions of the literature. 

In 1855 Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) began in The 

Warden his restful and marvellously life-like studies of 

fife in an English cathedral town, which he 

made famous under the name of "Barchester." 

Trollope had very positive and obvious limitations as a 

novelist, and paradoxical as it may sound, it is probable 






READE. 573 

that without these limitations his work would lose much 
of its charm. The little world to which he introduces 
us in his best books is substantial, comfortable, and — 
from one aspect — most soothingly commonplace. In this 
sleepy place the strain and tension of our time is hardly 
felt, and little happens which is not mildly agreeable or 
amusing; there are no great problems, no tragic intensity, 
no beating of the soul against the bars ; the very dulness is 
a grateful sedative. Trollope's humour is wholesome and 
kindly, he does not preach to us as do some of his betters, 
he has enriched English literature with the Bishop and 
Mrs. Proudie, and in Barchester he has provided for us a 
place of refuge. 

It was during these middle years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury that two other novelists, Charles Reade (1814-1884) 
and William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), won 
the popular favour. Reade was a rough but 
forcible writer, who, like Dickens, wrote many of his novels 
with the express purpose of exposing and correcting con- 
temporary social abuses. Christie Johnstone (1853) shows 
the weakness and folly of the idle aristocracy, by contrast- 
ing the languid and aimless rich with the vigorous activity 
of the Edinburgh fish-wives: It is Never too Late to Mend 
(1856) attacked the English prison system, and Put Your- 
self in His Place (1870) was directed against the trade- 
unions. In these stories we sometimes lose the novelist 
in the social reformer, but Reade when he chose was 
master of a vigorous and vivid narrative style. His one 
romance, The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), a wonderfully 
careful and minute study of life in the fifteenth century, 
has been placed by Swinburne "among the very greatest 
masterpieces of narration." 1 

William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) showed a fertility 
of invention and great ingenuity in the conception and 

1 Swinburne's Miscellanies, 1886. 



574 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

elaboration of his plots. He knew how to make the 
most of a mystery, and his characters, although often 
stagey and conventional, are sometimes distinctly 
Collins. amusing. On the whole, The Woman in White 
(1860), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone 
(1868) must be placed with the most skilfully written 
and fascinating novels of plot and incident. 

A few years before Trollope published The Warden, 
English readers had been thrilled by certain sombre and 
t" P ower ^ m stories at the farthest remove in their 
' passionate intensity from the placid and un- 
eventful existence which is pictured in the chronicles of 
Barsetshire. These stories were written by Charlotte, 
Emily, and Anne Bronte, the daughters of the parish 
clergyman of the little Yorkshire village of Haworth. 
The place was gloomy as well as remote. The parsonage 
overlooked a forlorn and crowded graveyard ; a bleak and 
windy moorland stretched away at the back. Mr. Bronte, 
the father, was severe and unsympathetic : the outlook on 
life was contracted. There were heavy domestic sorrows. 
The genius of the Bronte sisters broke through this nar- 
rowness and repression, and an accumulation of pent-up 
emotion, a sense of rebellion against the barriers of cir- 
cumstance, and a romantic delight in the mysterious and 
the terrible, were poured out into those extraordinary 
works of fiction which, after more than half a century, 
have not yet lost their charm. Charlotte Bronte (1816- 
1855) published Jane Eyre in 1847. In the same year 
Emily Bronte (1818-1848) published Wuthering Heights, a 
story which in its descriptions of nature, its sombre un- 
reality, and its wild and stirring power, seems, in some 
respects, the most perfect incarnation of the Bronte 
genius. 

Meanwhile the historical romance, although not the 
favourite form of fiction, was by no means abandoned. 



STEVENSON. 575 

Between the publication of Vanity Fair, in 1848, and 
the appearance of Daniel Deronda, in 1876, in those years 
when Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and George 
Eliot were revealing the life of contemporary 
England, Charles Kingsley found subjects for romance 
in the Alexandria of the fifth century (Hypatia, 1853), in 
the Elizabethan seamen (Westward Ho! 1855), and in the 
last struggle of the English against their Norman conquerors 
(Hereward, 1866). Towards the close of the same period 
R. D. Blackmore (1825-1900) published Lorna Boone 
(1869), a poetic story of life and love in the wild and 
beautiful scenery of North Devon. A little later, the 
year before the death of George Eliot, J. H. Shorthouse 
(1834-1903), a scholarly Birmingham manufacturer, won 
the praise of the cultivated and discerning by the spiritual 
elevation, subtle thought, and delicate beauty of his 
John Inglesant (1881), a philosophical romance of the 
time of Charles I. 

While Shorthouse was following up his first success, 
writing dreamy, finely-wrought, and tranquil stories, re- 
mote from the real world of thought and action, 
Stevenson. the ^ ove °^ romance revived at the touch of a 
very different master. Robert Louis (Bal- 
four) Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh, 
that "romantic town" in which, some seventy years before, 
Walter Scott, his great predecessor in romance, had first 
seen the light. In many ways Stevenson was Scott's 
spiritual descendant. Both were born with the rare gift 
of telling a story. Among many points of resemblance 
we note certain material dissimilarities. Scott's range of 
sympathy was far wider, his work more varied, his genius 
more comprehensive. Stevenson was a most careful and 
laborious artificer in words, fastidious to the verge of 
over-refinement in the niceties of style; Scott, one of the 
most happy-go-lucky and careless of writers, did not 



576 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

pause to hunt for the magical or curious word; he put the 
thought down as it came. 

Stevenson began his work in literature with sundry 
essays, sketches of travel, and short stories (cir. 1875- 
1883). These were followed in 1882 by Treasure Island, his 
first long story of adventure. Treasure Island is a boy's 
book — with a difference. We recognise the familiar mate- 
rials of the sensational story-teller, for here are pirates, a 
lonely and mysterious island, a search for hidden treasure, 
much bad language, and a prodigious expenditure of blood. 
But these rather shabby stage properties have become a 
new thing under Stevenson's hand. He has lifted his 
theme into a higher region by his own genuinely romantic 
enjoyment of the story, and by his gift of a literary style. 
When we understand the nature of Stevenson's success in 
this book, we have gone a long way towards understanding 
him and the especial nature of his genius. He had, as 
Henry James once said, " the perpetual boy in him." He 
kept that zest in life and adventure, that fine sensibility to 
outward impressions, that love of mystery, that buoyancy 
and romance, which are the glorious gift of youth. Ste- 
venson himself let us into the secret when he told us that a 
boy's poetic imagination survives in the man and becomes 
"the spice of life to (the) possessor." * In Stevenson this 
boyish love of adventure, this roving imagination, was 
joined to a mastery of style and to the literary conscience 
of the artist. For the most part Stevenson did not write 
his stories to reform anything or anybody; his business was 
not morals, religion, psychology, or social science, yet in his 
later books his view of life deepens and matures. We can- 
not follow his development here through Kidnapped 
(1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), David Balfour 
(or Catriona) (1893), up to his unfinished romance Weir of 
Hermiston. But one characteristic of his work cannot be 

1 The Lantern Bearers, 



' 



MEREDITH. 577 

entirely passed over — its pictorial power. His stories 
abound in scenes which are indelibly stamped on the imag- 
ination; we see David and Allan Breck frizzling on the top 
of the rock in Kidnapped, we see the duel between the 
brothers in the Master of Ballantrae, in the cold of that 
" windless " night when the sky was a black roof overhead 
and the candles burned steady. Apparently it was often 
the scene, the appropriate setting for a story, that set his 
imagination to work. "To his ardent fancy," said Mr. 
Sidney Colvin, "the world was a theatre, glaring with the 
lights and bristling with the incidents of romance." Ste- 
venson did not confine himself to fiction; he wrote a num- 
ber of remarkable essays, some literary criticism, and 
spirited, clever or charming verse. A youthful joy in 
romance, and an aesthetic devotion to the refinements of 
style, were far from satisfying his whole nature. He had 
a tougher fibre in him; he had the force to think and the 
strength to endure. So we have the Stevenson of Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of Thrawn Janet, Will o J the Mill, 
and Ms Triplex, the Stevenson who fought poverty, 
neglect, and ill health, with a gallant courage, and who 
could yet write for his own requiem : 

"Glad did I live and gladly die, 
And I laid me down with a will." 

Preeminent among the recent novelists are George 
Meredith (1828-1909) and Thomas Hardy (b. 1840). 

Meredith's position in contemporary fiction has 
andHard been, and to a great extent still remains, an 

exceptional one. For many years his work was 
utterly ignored by the many, although greatly praised by 
the few; and when the public were at length made to under- 
stand that to slight Meredith implied a lack of culture, 
the feeling of many a timid reader towards his novels was 
less a hearty liking than a distant and bewildered respect. 
To-day his novels hold the place of certain classics in the 



578 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

popular estimation; like Paradise Lost and Gibbon's 
Roman Empire they are enveloped in a haze of traditional 
reputation; they are almost as much venerated as those 
immortal works and almost as little read. At least one 
reason for this will become clear if we turn to the first 
pages of The Egoist (1879). Meredith when he desired to 
befog his readers was master of an almost unintelligible 
style. To the frequent difficulty of his manner must be 
added the difficulty of many of his themes. He was pro- 
fessedly the philosopher, who preferred to communicate 
the results of his study of human life through the form 
of fiction. Like Browning, with whom he is often com- 
pared, he was interested primarily in what men think, 
and only secondarily in what they do ; in the subtle psy- 
chologic analysis of the motives which produce and the 
consequences which follow the act, rather than in the act 
itself. Yet if there are difficulties in these novels, there 
is also [much that repays the effort to overcome them. 
A recent writer well says : " Whatever one's impression 
of Meredith's novels as novels, they indubitably contain 
a great deal of apt, entertaining, and original comment 
upon the general subject of human nature." Most of us 
probably will go further than this; we shall probably find 
in these extraordinary novels not only wise, if often cryp- 
tic, comments on fife, but also in the midst of much phil- 
osophy, certain memorable characters and scenes. But 
often, as in the justly famous love scene between Richard 
and Lucy in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, the figure of 
the author pops out like some cynical showman from 
behind his puppets, and we seem to hear Puck's amused 
comment (the comment of one alien to human passions), 
"What fools these mortals be." 

The sombre and impressive novels of Thomas Hardy 
are the work of a man of genius who is a poet at heart. 
The essentially poetic character of his mind is shown, not 



HARDY. 579 

in any outward adornment of style, but in the tone and 
construction of his greatest books, and in his whole view 
of human life and nature. When the critics 
Hardx * attempt to define the spirit of his work they in- 
stinctively compare or contrast it with that of 
the great poets, — with the work of iEschylus, Lucretius, 
or Shakespeare. This does not prove Mr. Hardy the equal 
of these master poets, but it does show that he has at 
least a touch of their quality, that he has that desire for 
the fundamental fact, that breadth and seriousness, found 
in men of the first order of genius. 

Born in an obscure hamlet, in the heart of a wooded 
region north of Dorchester, Mr. Hardy has passed the 
greater part of his life among the country scenes and the 
rustic life he has chosen to describe. He is "a peasant 
and a woodlander," a student and a thinker. At seven- 
teen he began the study of architecture in Dorsetshire, 
and at twenty he came up to London to practise his pro- 
fession. In 1871 he published his first novel, Desperate 
Remedies, and in 1874 won his first great popular success 
by Far From the Madding Crowd. He gave up the prac- 
tice of his profession, retired to Dorsetshire, and devoted 
himself to literary work. 

Mr. Hardy is one of the most subtle and sympathetic 
of the modern interpreters of Nature. His descriptions 
have the minuteness and accuracy born of long knowledge 
and close observation, and they show, what is even more 
than this, the power of entering into the mood of a scene, 
of making us feel the tone, or atmosphere, of a landscape, 
of identifying himself, as it would seem, with the very 
life of the natural objects he describes. These moors and 
farms and sheepfolds that he has revealed to us in storm 
and calm, in daylight, in darkness, or at dawn, he peoples 
with men and women of a strong, primitive type, the true 
children of the soil. He has written true pastorals, full of 



580 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

humour, and yet touched with an idyllic freshness and 
beauty; not suppressing homely or vulgar realities, but 
impressing us with a sense of the pathos and wonder in 
occupations that are as old, almost, as the life of men. In 
such books as Far From the Madding Crowd, we are 
brought near to that immemorial, and almost inarticu- 
late peasant class, that lives close to the dumb creatures, 
and in the old vital dependence upon the earth. Mr. 
Hardy's peasants inevitably suggest comparison with 
Shakespeare's rustics, and every reader feels that Jacob 
Poorgrass and his fellows belong with that immortal com- 
pany which produced Pyramus and Thisbe at the palace 
of Theseus. 

But Mr. Hardy does not merely show us the tragedy 
and comedy of human life, played by men and women of 
strong passions, of simple and powerful natures, 
life W ° upon an ancient and majestic scene. He is not 
an impartial, dispassionate observer, he is an 
interpreter or critic of life; he shows us the pettiness, the 
defeats, the Cruel misery and tragedy of man's lot, and 
forces us to ask why these things should be. The tran- 
sitory and ineffectual life of man is contrasted — as in 
the poetry of Matthew Arnold — with the permanence 
and power of the physical universe. But in Mr. Hardy's 
view, Nature is not merely indifferent to man: at times 
there is something in the constitution of things almost 
positively malign. To pervert Arnold's phrase, Mr. Hardy 
sees in the world " a power not ourselves that makes " not 
"for righteousness" but for failure and iniquity. Man is 
not the captain of his soul, he is the helpless victim of 
ironic and malicious forces. At the critical moments the 
thing we call chance intervenes to ruin him; uncontrol- 
lable passion, implanted within him, defeats his best aims 
and drives him to death and failure. "As flies to wanton 
boys, so we to the gods, they kill us for their sport." In a 



HARDY. 581 

word, Mr. Hardy's greatest and most earnest novels are 
written to illustrate and enforce a view of life analogous 
to that of Lucretius or of Schopenhauer. 

Without inquiring into the correctness of such views, 
we may observe that the passionate sincerity of Mr. 
Hardy's convictions has apparently impaired his impar- 
tiality as an observer of the facts of life. Especially in 
some of his later books he resembles a scientist who, in 
his anxiety to prove a preconceived theory, observes and 
reports upon only one set of facts, unconsciously slighting 
or suppressing whatever militates against his conclusion. 
We are asked to concur in Mr. Hardy's verdict, but we 
must remember that his conclusion is based on data which 
he himself has carefully selected and arranged. There are, 
in fact, sources of consolation which he ignores, substan- 
tial mitigations of the miseries of existence which have 
absolutely no place in his world. This failure to view 
these eternal problems with the comprehensive or impar- 
tial intelligence of iEschylus, or of Shakespeare, this 
inability to weigh all the evidence and to see life fairly 
in all its aspects, is a flaw in Mr. Hardy's art. At the 
same time, his earnestness, his sincerity, his poetic genius, 
and dramatic power, entitle him to a high place among 
the masters of English fiction. 

While the life and aspirations of the age found their 
most popular and influential interpretation in the novel, 
the Victorian era made some lasting additions to 
V oetry an the ^ great body of English poetry. Poetry was 
studied and practiced as an art with a care 
which recalls the age of Anne, and even minor writers 
acquired an extraordinary finish and a mastery of novel 
poetic forms. This attention to form is commonly thought 
to have begun with Keats, and Tennyson proved himself 
one of the most versatile and consummate artists in the 
history of English verse. As is usual in periods of scru- 



582 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

pulous and conscious art, this Victorian poetry was grace- 
ful or meditative, rather than powerful and passionate. 
It excelled in the lyric rather than in the dramatic form; 
it delighted in expressing the poet's own shifting moods, 
and as a rule it left to the novel the vigorous objective 
portrayal of life. It found a relief in escaping from the 
confined air of our modern life into the freedom and sim- 
plicity of nature, and it never lost that subtle and in- 
spired feeling for the mystery of the visible world which 
came into poetry in the previous century. The supremacy 
of science and the advance of democracy, the two domi- 
nant motive forces in recent English life and thought, 
acted on modern poetry in different ways. There were 
poets who thought themselves fallen on evil days; who, 
repelled by the sordidness, ugliness, and materialism of a 
scientific and mercantile generation, sought to escape in 
poetry to a world less vulgar and more to their minds. 
Like Keats, they ignored the peculiar hopes and perplexi- 
ties of their age, to wander after the all-sufficient spirit of 
beauty, and like Keats they found refuge and inspiration 
in the romance and mysticism of the Middle Ages or in 
the repose, restraint, and beauty of the world of the 
Greeks. This aesthetic and neo-classic spirit in literature, 
was associated with the rise of a new school of 
BaphaeUtes. painters, known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brother- 
hood. This school was founded about 1848 by 
three young painters, William Holman Hunt, Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais. A little later 
Thomas Woolner, a sculptor, and others joined the move- 
ment. These men aimed to free English art from its 
bondage to a formal or conventional manner, which as they 
believed, hindered its progress. Their avowed object was 
"to enforce and encourage an entire adherence to the 
simplicity of nature." Painters were then taught to copy 
Raphael; the Brotherhood went back for their models to 



THE PRE-RAPHAELITES. 583 

certain Italian painters before Raphael's time, which 
were then comparatively neglected. While they advo- 
cated truth and simplicity in painting, the Pre-Raphael- 
ites often went back to the Middle Ages for their subjects, 
and much of their work was full of a mysticism and sym- 
bolic suggestion, characteristic of the mediaeval spirit. 
From this aspect, therefore, the Pre-Raphaelite move- 
ment was but an additional manifestation of that sym- 
pathy with the Middle Ages which had already declared 
itself in other ways. The ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites 
found literary expression in a magazine called The Germ 
(1850). Rossetti was a poet as well as a painter. As he 
exerted a powerful influence on poets as well as on paint- 
ers, and as he often expressed the same or similar con- 
ceptions in both colour and verse, a curiously close relation 
between poetry and painting became one of the charac- 
teristics of the movement. Pictures were suggested by 
poems, poems were written to illustrate or to interpret 
pictures, so that the ideals of this group of poets and 
painters were often embodied almost simultaneously in 
two arts. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), the son 
of an exiled Italian painter and scholar, was the leading 
spirit of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, at least on its 
poetic or literary side. The elder Rossetti was a poet 
and a student of Dante, and his children grew up in an 
atmosphere of Italian art and culture. One of his sons, 
William Michael Rossetti, became well known as a critic 
and translator, and his daughter, Christina Rossetti 
(1830-1894), stands with Mrs. Browning as one of the fore- 
most women poets of her time. Dante Rossetti left school 
at fourteen and began the study of art. From early child- 
hood he was both a reader and a writer of verse. The 
Blessed Damosel, one of the best known and most char- 
acteristic of his poems, was composed in his nineteenth 
year, and was first published in The Germ. In 1861 he 



584 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

published some masterly translations of early Italian 
poetry, but his public recognition as a poet dates from 
the appearance of his collection of Poems in 1870. This 
book, which was eulogistically reviewed by his friends, 
produced a sensation in the literary world hardly inferior 
to that created a few years earlier by Swinburne's Poems 
and Ballads. There was a morbid and neurotic strain in 
Rossetti's artistic and poetic temperament, and the last 
years of his life were both pitiable and tragic. He was 
sensitive, emotionally over-wrought, self-willed, and self- 
indulgent. Absorbed in his art, he was " physically indo- 
lent/' and he had "practically no recreations." His 
health, naturally good, became impaired, and he suffered 
from neuralgia and insomnia. Unable to endure physi- 
cal suffering he became addicted to the use of chloral, 
and lived for years a most unwholesome, secluded, and 
wretched life. He was subject to morbid delusions, but 
some of his best poems were composed during this time. 
There was something both winning and commanding 
about Rossetti's personality, and the devotion of his 
friends is the one redeeming feature in these painful and 
darkened years. He died in 1882. 

Rossetti's poetry has called forth some severe criticism, 
and much unmeasured, perhaps extravagant, praise. His 

place among the English poets is still uncer- 
poetry? 1 ' 8 ^ m : but ft ^ s proper to observe that his most 

unbounded eulogists, such as Mr. Swinburne and 
Walter Pater, have been men who were bound to him 
by personal loyalty and affection, and who sympathised 
with his views of life and art. The aesthetic school of 
poetry embodied certain fundamental poetic principles of 
Keats', and upon the soundness of those principles its 
permanent value must, to a large extent, depend, 1 

1 It is but fair to remind the reader that there is no conclusive 
authority on these matters, and that any criticism of Rossetti and his 
followers must be of necessity a personal judgment. 



ROSSETTI. 585 

Pater declared that Rossetti had "ever something about 
him of mystic isolation/' and one of the most pronounced 
features of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry is its deliberate 
aloofness from actual life. Rossetti and his associates 
separated themselves from the activities and responsi- 
bilities of their time, from the ordinary interests, occupa- 
tions, consolations, and desires of the men about them, 
and built a Palace of Art for their delight and their place 
of refuge. Such a retirement from the world into a Sanc- 
tuary of Beauty has its dangers for the artist as well as for 
the man. Poetry, divorced from any normal relation to 
life, is in grave peril of becoming effeminate, languorous, 
over-elaborated, morbid, and unreal. The poet, loving 
Beauty only and absorbed in a mere luxury of emotion, 
loses his vitality and poise of nature, and his art suffers. 

Rossetti had great artistic gifts; his poetry is richly col- 
oured, his verse is curiously and skilfully wrought, but his 
work is not entirely wholesome, manly, or sincere. His 
poetic world lies beyond the bounds of our ordinary expe- 
rience, — a shadowy world, ruled by mystery, wonder, 
beauty and love, and lit by another light than that of com- 
mon day. In his poetry something of the unearthly spirit 
of Blake and of the poet of The Ancient Mariner, some- 
thing of the magic of Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 
survives. "The Renaissance of Wonder," says Theodore 
Watts-Dunton, " culminates in Rossetti's poetry as it 
culminates in his paintings." There can be no question 
that Rossetti's poems are beautiful; that they are full of 
pictures, like some illuminated missal, gorgeous in colour, 
and marvellously wrought. It is more doubtful whether, 
as has been often urged, this outward beauty in Rossetti's 
work is but the visible garment, or symbol of spirit. Ros- 
setti, it has been said, is at heart a mystic. According to 
this view, all the mysteries of the world of spirit, all 
those realities above the reach of sense, were revealed to 



586 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

Rossetti through beauty and emotion. The unseen 
reached him through the loveliness of colour and form, and 
he learned the secrets of the universe " from a woman's 
eyes." This view has probably an element of truth; 
nevertheless, Rossetti 's poetry is not so much spiritual as 
unreal. It may be lit by a spiritual radiance, but if so 
the white light is changed by the many-coloured medium 
through which it has passed, and split up into rich and 
gorgeous hues. In other words, while it may be that in 
Rossetti's poetry body is united with soul, yet in this 
union it is not the spiritualisation of the body which im- 
presses us, it is the materialisation of things spiritual and 
unseen. In The Blessed Damozel, for instance, earthly 
love is carried into the very courts of heaven. Standing 
on " the ramparts of God's house," the gaze of the maiden 
is fixed, her longings are centred on the earth. With all 
its background of Christian imagery, admirably decora- 
tive as it is, from the pictorial point of view, the poem is 
essentially pagan. Rossetti has been often compared to 
Dante, but Dante believed in the spirit behind the symbol, 
while Rossetti, an avowed agnostic, found a certain aes- 
thetic satisfaction in the beauty of Christian ritual and 
creed. The result in Rossetti's case was an inconsistency, 
a touch of insincerity, which injures the quality of his work. 
There are poems of Rossetti's not open to such objections, 
and in any case, it is beyond question that in such master- 
pieces as The Burden of Nineveh, The King's Tragedy, 
The Last Confession, and many of the Sonnets he has made 
an unique and considerable contribution to the poetry of 
his time. 

Among the little band of devoted followers that Rossetti 
gathered around him in the earlier part of his career was 
William William Morris (1834-1896), a man of rest- 
Morris. i ess energy and an extraordinary versatility of 
mind. Morris tried his hand at painting, architecture, 



MORRIS. 587 

and poetry. In 1863, in conjunction with Rossetti, Ford 
Maddox Browne, and Edward Burne-Jones, he founded an 
establishment for household decoration. Morris was the 
leading spirit, although by no means the greatest artist, 
in this enterprise, which was deservedly successful. But 
while Morris's energy expended itself in many directions, — 
while he made household furniture, stained-glass windows, 
curtains, rugs, and tapestry, or sought to improve the art 
of printing and book making, — one controlling motive 
gives a unity to his work. A true lover of beauty himself, 
he tried in innumerable ways to stimulate a national love 
of the beautiful, to refine the popular taste, and to mitigate 
the ugliness or commercialism of modern life. 

In early manhood Morris was fascinated by the strange 
beauty of The Blessed Damosel, and a little later he met 
Rossetti and was strongly influenced by his magnetic and 
dominant personality. Like the other members of the 
little group, Morris was strongly attracted to the Middle 
Ages, and his first book, The Defence of Guenevere and other 
Poems (1858), consists of a series of remarkable mediaeval 
studies. One of the poems in this collection, "The Hay- 
stack in the Flood," presents the passionate and savage 
side of mediaeval life with truth and power, but many of 
the poems are purely pictorial. In these poems every- 
thing is studiously unreal; the knights, the maidens with 
large eyes and yellow hair and decorative figures, and all 
those objects and images w T hich were the theatrical "pro- 
perties" of the Pre-Raphaelites are freely introduced. 
"Tall damsels clad in white and scarlet walk in garths of 
lily and sunflower, or under apple boughs, or feed the 
swans in the moat." x Morris showed the same avoidance 
of the problems and vexations of modern life in his classic 
study The Life and Death of Jason (1867), and in The 
Earthly Paradise (1868-1870), containing the most popular 
1 Beers' English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century, 327. 



588 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

and possibly the best of his poems. The Earthly Paradise 
is a collection of twenty-four romantic narrative poems 
on classic or mediaeval themes. A thread of connection, 
similar to that employed in the Canterbury Tales, holds 
these stories together. A company of adventurers, having 
left Norway in the time of pestilence in search of an earthly 
paradise where they may escape the fear of death, are hos- 
pitably received at a western city, founded by Greek exiles 
centuries before. For the space of a year the mariners and 
their hosts meet and beguile the time with telling the 
stories drawn from many sources which compose the main 
part of the poem. The Earthly Paradise, it has been said, 
"is fit reading for sleepy slimmer afternoons." We are 
transported to an enchanted region, a world of beautiful 
illusions, where everything seems shadowy and remote. 
Nothing here moves us very deeply; it is as though we saw 
life through a golden haze that dimmed and softened the 
harsh edge of reality. Our dreamy contentment is dis- 
turbed by no cry of human passion; it is interrupted by no 
real earnestness of mood, by no memorable thought; we 
are permitted to glide along on the smooth current of the 
even, melodious, and (it must be confessed) somewhat 
monotonous verse. Morris did not attempt to do more in 
The Earthly Paradise than bring a temporary repose and 
forgetfulness through art. 

"Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, 
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? 

* Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme 
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, 
Telling a tale not too importunate 
To those who in the sleepy region stay, 
Lulled by the singer of an empty day." 1 

But even in The Earthly Paradise, a poem in which the 
" idle singer " deliberately seeks for relief in a world of the 
ideal, there is a subdued but unmistakable undertone of 
1 The Earthly Paradise (Prefatory verses). 



MORRIS. 589 

sadness. Art such as this may be a sedative, but the poet 
knows that it is powerless to ease the real ills of life, that 
it cannot "make quick-coming death a little thing." * The 
spirit of Morris and Rossetti was essentially pagan ; in their 
poetry, as in so much pagan literature, the love of life and 
beauty is quickened by the dread of death. 2 A philosophy 
and a mood familiar to the pagan is summed up in one of 
the refrains of Morris's songs: 

"Kiss me, love, for who knoweth 
What thing cometh after death? " ' 

But Morris, in spite of his poems, was no mere dreamer; 
he was a burly, robust man, full of vitality, a fighter and 
a reformer. In his later years, he faced, as Ruskin 
did, the pressing social questions of his time, and strove 
manfully to set the crooked straight. He abandoned the 
liberal party in 1880, and, a little later, actively espoused 
the socialistic cause. A belief in the possibility of social 
reform gave a new hopefulness and vigour to some of Mor- 
ris's later verse, and entered largely into his prose-romance, 
The Dream of John Ball (1888). Morris's socialism, how- 
ever, was largely the expression of his aesthetic and artistic 
ideals; it sprang rather from his desire to make the world 
more picturesque and beautiful than from any deep human 
sympathy. Shortly before he threw himself into socialis- 
tic work, Morris, who was deeply interested in Iceland, had 
brought out Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs 
(1876), a fine poem of epic proportions, taken from Icelan- 
dic sources. Morris was a prolific writer both in poetry 
and in prose; he had unquestionably a strong influence 
upon the social, artistic, and literary life of his time, but 
there is a diffuseness in his poetry which is likely to tell 

1 The Earthly Paradise (Prefatory verses). 

2 See concluding paragraph of Pater's essay, "^Esthetic Poetry/' 
in Appreciations. 

1 Earthly Paradise, "Ogier the Dane." 



690 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

against its permanence. "iEstheticism," said Ibsen, "is 
as fatal to poetry as theology is to religion." Fluent and 
beautiful as Morris's poetry is, it is lacking in human sym- 
pathy; it extends over a wide area, but its forces are 
seldom concentrated in the living or memorable phrase. 

Another poet associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Broth- 
erhood was Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837- 
1909). Swinburne, the eldest son of Admiral 
Charles Henry Swinburne, came of an old and 
honourable Northumbrian family. He was educated at 
Eton and at Oxford. He visited Landor in Italy whom he 
already passionately admired, and he began a long and close 
friendship with William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and 
Rossetti, who was nine years his senior. But while Swin- 
burne, like Morris and Rossetti, lived in an ideal world of 
art and beauty ; while, like his brother poets, he often chose 
to write on classic or mediaeval themes, — his temper, un- 
like theirs, was not gentle and dreamy, but stirring, rebel- 
lious and defiant. The first book of Swinburne's to make a 
decided impression on lovers of poetry, was his noble clas- 
sical drama, Atalanta in Calydon (1865). Atalanta is among 
the greatest reproductions of classical tragedy in English 
literature; without attempting to settle questions of pre- 
cedence, we may safely class it with Milton's Samson Ago- 
nistes and with Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Its pathos 
is true and restrained; and in its choruses, with their 
superb union of force and grace, with the exultant and im- 
petuous lightness of their lyrical flight, the world heard for 
the first time the marvellous music of the great modern 
master of English verse. True to the spirit of Hellenic 
tragedy, Atalanta shows man helpless in the grasp of fate. 
Although the hero, Meleager, perishes through the act of 
his mother, he declares that he is really slain by that 
law which mixed death with his life from the beginning. 
But while the play is so far classical, Swinburne departs 



SWINBURNE. 591 

widely from the spirit of the great Greek tragedians in per- 
mitting the Chorus to hurl defiance and rebuke at the Ruler 
and Maker of the world. This bitter and passionate in- 
dictment of the ordering of the universe is more akin to 
the rebellion of Schopenhauer, Byron, or Hardy, than the 
deeply religious spirit of iEschylus or Sophocles. In 1866 
the publication of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads awoke 
a tempest of mingled praise and condemnation. While the 
religious and moral sense of the nation was shocked and 
disgusted, lovers of poetry, and especially those who were 
young and enthusiastic, were in raptures over the new 
poet's consummate mastery of language and metre, and 
over the indescribable magic of his strange melodies. Swin- 
burne produced much after the publication of this extraor- 
dinary book. He published Bothivell (1874), Mary Stuart 
(1881), and several other long historical dramas ; he com- 
posed a second classical tragedy, Erectheus (1876), Tris- 
tram of Lyonesse (1882), a romantic narrative poem of 
great beauty, together with odes and other lyrics, and 
a very large amount of prose. We cannot but be im- 
pressed by this extraordinary mass of work. Its volume 
alone inspires respect, and as we read we find evidences on 
almost every page of the wealth of the poet's vocabulary 
and his technical skill. But astonishing as this work is, 
we can find in it, as a whole, no assurance of progress. 
Indeed, in the more than forty years between Swinburne's 
early triumphs and his death, he possibly never equalled, 
and almost certainly never surpassed, the supreme efforts 
of his youth. 

Swinburne's ultimate place among the English poets is 
still uncertain. Every one admits his gifts of expression ; 
every one agrees that he is " a born tamer of words," — 
" an absolutely consummate artist of word music of the 
current and tempestuous kind." But many feel that he 
is not merely fluent, but too often unrestrained and diffuse. 



592 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

Many grow satiated with "this revel of rhymes " (as Swin* 
burne himself described it) ; bewildered with the rush and 
din of this unfailing torrent of words they long for more 
matter and less art, for some solid basis of thought, some 
inspiration that they can live by, for some evidence of the 
philosophic mind. A few recent enthusiasts, indeed, have 
pronounced Swinburne a profound and original thinker; if 
this be so, he has concealed the fact from the great ma- 
jority of his readers and critics. 1 Swinburne, in fact, is an 
artist, not a philosopher. He is guided by impulse, by 
feeling, not by careful thought, or a well-balanced judg- 
ment, and, when he essays to think, his highly emotional 
nature combined, as it is, with an extraordinary volubility, 
leads him into extremes. As a critic, his command of lan- 
guage is at once Ms distinction and Ms weakness; it betrays 
him into reckless and unmeasured statements, and it has 
made him preeminent as a master of exaggerated eulogy 
or unmeasured vituperation. In spirit Byron and Swin- 
burne, while separated by obvious differences in form, have 
much in common. Both men show the same genuine, but 
shallow ardour for liberty; the same impatience of restraint; 
the same passionate rebellion against the order of things. 
But the author of the Hymn to Proserpine and of the Hymn 
to Man is more direct and daring than the author of Cain 
and Don Juan. To Swinburne, life is bitterness; love a 
consuming passion, an added misery; death a welcome 
oblivion which shall cure and end all. Man, indeed, is the 
one being in creation worthy of reverence, "the master of 
tilings," and in the progress of man towards some unde- 
fined goal, Swinburne finds, or attempts to find, a ground 

1 Mr. James Douglas writes: "In sheer intellectual power of the 
imagination Mr. Swinburne is surpassed by none of his contemporaries 
— in his best work the conquest of sense is as complete as the con- 
quest of sound; the mastery of mind is as triumphant as the mastery 
of music." Chambers' Cyclopedia of English Literature, iii. 677 
(Revised Ed.) 



ARNOLD. CLOUGH, AND THOMSON. 593 

of consolation and of hope. In such ideas there is nothing 
either original or profound. Swinburne's lack of philo- 
sophic insight should not blind us to the splendour of 
his poetic achievement, nor should the glorious melody, 
the profuse beauty of his verse, lead us to attribute 
to his poetry virtues which it cannot fairly be said to 
possess. 

Swinburne's poetry is distinctly and vehemently anti- 
Christian; other poets of the period distressed by doubts, 
Arnold an( ^ unable to reconcile the old faith with 

Clough, and the new knowledge of their time, carried into 

omson. ifoQij. WO rk that uncertainty and unbelief which 
was the moral disease of their generation. As we have 
said, the most characteristic poetry of Matthew Arnold is 
the outcome of this mood, having in its doubts a forlorn 
and pathetic bravery sadder than open despair. Some- 
what the same tone is present, but animated by a strain of 
greater faith and hope, in the poems of Arnold's friend, 
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), a man of genius and of 
promise, while James Thomson's City of Dreadful Night 
(1874) is the poetry of despair. It is chiefly by this poem, 
profoundly original, and burdened with a suffocating 
weight of gloom and terror, that Thomson is known. Be- 
side the weary anguish of his cry from the abyss, the dis- 
content of Byron seems the petulance of a spoiled child. 
But the pathos of Thomson's misery is heightened by a 
study of less familiar poems in which another side of his 
nature is disclosed. From them we learn to see in him a 
marvellous power of abandonment to joy, only surpassed 
by his capacity for despair. Few poems in our literature 
are gladdened with as keen a sensibility to beauty as the 
opening portion of He heard Her Sing. Here the rapture 
of the artist's temperament finds voice, and the verse leaps 
forward with a tumultuous delight in the joy of life. Two 
little idyls, Sunday at Hampstead, and Sunday Up the River, 



594 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

are very quiet and full of sunshine ; but such poems only 
serve to intensify by contrast the blackness of Thomson's 
despair. 

Happily, the two greatest and most representative poets 
of the Victorian epoch, Alfred Tennyson and Robert 
Browning, neither preached " the religion of Beauty," nor 
The TDoetrv taught the philosophy of despair. Differing 
of faith and widely in manner and in their theory of art, 
hope. faey have at least one point in common. Both 

faced frankly and boldly the many questions of their age ; 
neither evading nor succumbing to its intellectual diffi- 
culties, they still found beauty and goodness in the life of 
the world about them ; holding fast the " things which are 
not seen " as a present reality, they still cherished " the 
faith which looks through death." 

Alfbed Tennyson (1809-1892) is generally acknowl- 
edged as the representative English poet of his time. So 
far as contemporary judgment can foresee, his 
£ lfred work will stand to posterity as the most rounded, 

melodious, and adequate expression in poetry 
of the soul of Victorian England. Singularly sensitive to 
the intellectual and spiritual perturbations of his time, he 
responded to its moods, entered into its passing phases 
of thought, and made them the very breath and animating 
principle of his work. He was a lover of beauty and his 
view of life was essentially spiritual, yet one great motive 
power in his work was that science which was the dominant 
intellectual force in his time. 

Close as he lived to his age in spirit, Tennyson dwelt 
in communion with Nature, holding himself consistently 
aloof from active participation in the restless and high- 
pressure life of his generation. Shy, morbidly sensitive, 
silent, except among an inner circle of chosen friends, the 
poet locked himself from his kind with books and Nature, 
a remote and keen observer of the conflicts in which 



TENNYSON. 595 

he did not share; to whose eyes the whole battlefield lay 
disclosed. 

Thus two great influences seem to have combined in Ten- 
nyson's life, to render him what he was: Nature and books. 
Like Wordsworth, he was country-bred, and shunned the 
air of cities; even to the last he "still was Nature's priest. " 
But, unlike Wordsworth, who had but little of the book- 
lover or the scholar about him, 1 Tennyson lived close to his 
time, and to all times, through his love of books. On the 
side of scholarship, Tennyson claims kindred, not with 
Wordsworth, but with Milton, who was, perhaps, rather 
the poet of the library than of the fields. Like Milton, he 
brought to the service of his art all that could be gathered 
by a lifelong study of the great productions of the past. 
His poetry represents the best traditions of literature, as 
truly as Browning's represents a distinctly radical element, 
and he constantly delights the scholar by reminiscences of 
his studies of the great poets of antiquity. 2 Through the 
printed page he felt with no less distinctness the pulse of 
the world of living men without. The force of these com- 
bined influences, books and Nature, grows clearer as we 
recall the story of the poet's secluded and uneventful life. 

Alfred Tennyson was born August 6, 1809, at Somersby, 
a tiny village in the East Midland region of Lincolnshire, 
where his father, the Rev. George Clayton Ten- 
^ennysons n y S0Ilj was rec tor. The country immediately 
about Somersby has a richness and beauty want- 
ing in many parts of the county ; there is no fenland, but 
the hills slope softly into rich valleys. Here and there are 
bits of woodland ; near by there is a glen where the earth is 

1 V. t inter alia, the story of Wordsworth's cutting the pages of 
Burke with a knife which had been used to butter toast, in De Quin- 
cey's Literary Reminiscences, chap, xiii., "Wordsworth and Southey." 

2 V. E. C. Stedman's study of Tennyson and Theocritus, in his 
Victorian Poets, and the more recent work of J. Churton Collins on 
the classical element in Tennyson. 



596 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

moist under the shadow of the pines. It was into the depth 
of this glen, while the world was mourning a great poet, 
that the boy Tennyson stole away alone, and in the fullness 
of his youthful despair cut in the sandstone the words, 
" Byron is dead." Tennyson's work bears witness to the 
indelible impress of these early surroundings. The ex- 
plorer recognizes here the brook 

"That loves 
To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, 
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves; " l 

he comes upon a grey, half -ruined grange which recalls the 
desolate retreat of Mariana, or, from a neighbouring hill, 
he looks out over the long sweep of the "ridged wolds" 
which, rising from the low levels of the plain, stretch away 
forty miles to the northward until they meet the distant 
waters of the Humber. 

"Calm and still light on yon great plain 
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, 
And crowded farms and lessening towers, 
.To mingle with the bounding main." 2 

The grassy expanse of the Lincolnshire wolds, "wide, 
wild, and open to the air," under a heaven of grey cloud, is 
suggested in the opening lines of "The Dying Swan," while 
an allusion like that to "the low morass and whispering 
reed" carries us to the fenland that lay a short distance to 
the south. We must think of the boy Tennyson wander- 
ing among such scenes, from the first reticent and undemon- 
strative, but, we may be sure, living through those intense, 
inward experiences which, often hidden or unintelligible 
to those about, yet make up the true life-history of every 
emotional and imaginative child. After some training at 
home, and in the Grammar School at Louth, a town some 
twenty miles from Somersby, Tennyson entered Trinity 

1 "Ode to Memory." * In Memoriam, xi. 



TENNYSON, 597 

College, Cambridge, in 1828. Here, shy as he was, he 
showed that he had a rare and beautiful capacity for friend- 
ship. He joined a debating society which included among 
its members James Spedding, F. D. Maurice, R. C. Trench, 
and others, — the choicest spirits of the college. 1 Above all 
the others was one whose short life is indissolubly linked 
with the career of Tennyson, Arthur Henry Hallam, a 
yoimg man of rare promise and singularly sweet and lov- 
able nature. Long before he entered college Tennyson had 
written verses; he had even printed a volume in conjunc- 
tion with his brother, Charles, in 1827; but at Cambridge 
he first made a decided impression by his prize poem, Tim- 
buctoo. In 1830 Tennyson made his real entrance into the 
world of English letters by the publication of a slim volume, 
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. We can see now, in this little book, 
the advent of a new poet. It is largely the work of an ex- 
perimentalist in metre and melody, including as it does 
such tone-studies as "Claribel" and "Lilian." These are 
the preliminary studies of an artist with a fresh and ex- 
quisite feeling for beauty of form, who is bent on mastering 
the technique of his craft. Differing widely from Pope in 
his poetic manner, he had an equally scrupulous desire for 
technical excellence. He had something of Keats' sensu- 
ous delight in colour and melody, something of his magical 
excellence of phrase, yet even in this early effort we detect 
a characteristic note of divergence from those poets who, 
like Keats, loved "beauty only/' He shows us his ideal 
poet, 2 " dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
the love of love," whose melodies fling all abroad "the 
winged shafts" not of beauty but "of truth." In a re- 
markable and important poem, The Palace of Art, which 

1 Many of them became Tennyson's lifelong friends. For reminis- 
cences of the society v. In Memoriam, lxxxvii. 

2 See "The Poet " and "The Poet's Mind," included originally in 
the edition of 1830. 



598 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

appeared in a volume published in 1832, Tennyson denned 
his position on this point with extraordinary vigour and 
distinctness. Against Keats' reiterated poetic principle, 
that 

"Beauty is truth; truth, beauty," l 

Tennyson set the solemn allegory of the "sinful soul," 
which possessed all good things, merely that they might 
contribute to a mere selfish lust of aesthetic enjoyment. 
Stricken through at last with remorse, the soul, in the iso- 
lation of its gilded towers, hears afar off, with perception 
born of love, the call of humanity. To the fine aesthetic 
sensibilities of Keats, Tennyson thus added a moral earn- 
estness in which, so far as appears, Keats was deficient. 
He remained unfaltering in his allegiance to the loftiest 
conception of the poet's mission. It is his distinction to 
have successfully combined the conscience of the man with 
'the conscience of the artist, and to the last to have "fol- 
lowed the gleam." 2 

Tennyson lost his father in 1830, and in that year left 
Cambridge without taking a degree. In 1833 came the 
shock of a profounder sorrow in the loss of his more than 
brother, Arthur Hallam, 3 who died suddenly at Vienna. 
In Memoriam, that incomparable poem in which Tennyson 
long after gave to the world the record of this story of 
friendship and loss, admits us into the sacred places of 
this great grief. Tennyson's shy and morbidly reticent 
nature made him shrink from contact with the world at 
large, and he was all the more dependent for love and 
sympathy on the friendship of the tried and chosen few. 
Among them Hallam had held the first place, and his 
loss not only seemed to tear away part of Tennyson's 
life, but, if we may judge from In Memoriam, it set the 

1 Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. 

3 See "Merlin and the Gleam," in Demeter, and Other Poems. 

3 "More than my brothers are to me." — In Memoriam, ix., Ixxix, 



TENNYSON. 599 

poet face to face with the everlasting and primal questions 
of existence. The secret vicissitudes of the soul within 
us, the hidden convulsions which shake the balance of 
life, the painful readjustment to changed conditions, — these 
things that constitute the essence of a true biography, are 
but a matter of surmise to those without. After Hallam's 
death Tennyson settled in London, living much to himself, 
writing constantly, but publishing almost nothing. He 
belonged to a select coterie, the " Sterling Club," where 
he met Carlyle, Thackeray, Landor, and other famous 
men. It was a time of preparation and growth, under 
the teaching of death and sorrow. Nearly ten years of 
silence were at last broken by the publication, in 1842, of 
two volumes of poems. The book included all of the 
earlier poems of which the author's maturer taste approved, 
revised with the Tennysonian fastidiousness, and about 
as much new matter. The new poems, among which 
were the "Morte d'Arthur," "Ulysses," "The Two Voices," 
and "Locksley Hall," showed a broadening and deepening 
power, and the volumes won Tennyson an enthusiastic 
recognition from both critics and readers. A year later 
the veteran Wordsworth pronounced him "decidedly the 
greatest of our living poets," 1 and from this time he took 
that leading place in the literature of his day which his 
astonishing vitality and productiveness so long main- 
tained. The collected poems of 1842 showed plainly that 
distinguishing trait of Tennyson, his extraordinary mas- 
tery in widely different fields. His genius is eclectic. The 
classic world, as in "Ulysses" or " Lucretius "; the mediae- 
val, as in "Stylites" or "Galahad"; the modern, as in 
"The Gardener's Daughter" or Maud, all are at his com- 
mand. He is the consummate artist, as versatile in 
manner as he is varied in subject. He can pass at will 

1 Letter to Professor Henry Reed, quoted in Hallam Tennyson's 
Life of Alfred Tennyson, v. i. p. 210. 



600 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

from the noble epic roll of the Idylls to the rough dialect 
of the "Northern Farmer"; from the pseudo-Words- 
worthian simplicity of "Dora" to the somewhat Corinthian 
ornateness of Enoch Arden. In "The Voyage of Mael- 
dune" he touches Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, while 
in such stirring battle lyrics as "The Revenge" and the 
"Light Brigade" he invades the province of Drayton and 
of Campbell. Yet in all there is an indefinable flavour 
of individuality; the rough edges and sharp angles of fact 
are softened, and life is seen through a golden haze of 
meditative beauty. In the smooth flow of the verse, in 
its very turns and pauses, we recognise the trick of the 
Tennysonian manner. "Locksley Hall" is one of the 
poems which show the nearness of the poet to his time. 
It breathes the intensity, the exaggeration, the quick 
despair, the vast and unconquerable hopes of youth, and 
it sounded as a trumpet call to the young men of that 
generation. We are swept on in its buoyant movement 
by the prophetic enthusiasm of the new science which 
was transforming the world. The strain of personal 
complaining is overpowered by the deep pulsations of the 
"wondrous mother age." In its vision of the world that 
shall be, the very heavens are filled with the argosies of 
commerce. Then there comes that chant of a progressive 
humanity which is one of the recurrent motifs in modern 
literature. As Burns had discerned a time of universal 
brotherhood "comin' yet for a' that," so Tennyson sees 
afar off the era of a universal peace, the day of the parlia- 
ment of man, when the whole world shall be one group 
of confederated states, when 

" — the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, 
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law." 

From 1842 until the time of his death, Tennyson lived 
a life of seclusion and steady industry: a life marked by 



TENNYSON. 601 

few striking outward happenings, and chiefly remarkable 
for that progress of the soul within, of which the succession 
of his books is the lasting memorial. The year 1850 
stands out from the rest as the year of his marriage to 
Miss Emily Sellwood, of the publication of In Memoriam, 
and of his appointment to the Laureateship. Three years 
later he settled at Farringford, in the Isle of Wight. With 
Farringford, and with a place at Blackdown in Sussex, 
which he bought in 1867 to avoid the curiosity of Ameri- 
can tourists, his later life is chiefly associated. He bent 
all the fullness of his powers to win success in two great 
fields of poetry which in his earlier years he had left unat- 
tempted — the Epic and the Drama. Four of the Idylls 
of the King appeared in 1859, and others were gradually 
added until the work grew to the symmetry of its full 
proportions. In 1875 he published Queen Mary, the first 
of his series of drama. That a poet of sixty-six, with a 
lifetime of successes behind him in widely different lines, 
should leave them to struggle with the difficulties of a 
new and highly technical form of composition, and that 
he should persevere in this in spite of repeated discourage- 
ments, is worthy of especial notice. The purely spiritual 
side of Tennyson's genius, present almost from the first, 
grew with his growth. The merely sensuous delight in 
the tangible revelation of beauty, the luxury of eye and 
ear, yielded to a deeper perception of an underlying world 
of spirit, of which this world of sight and touch seemed 
but the shadow. The second "Locksley Hall" is full of a 
sense of the limitations of the new science, as the first 
is the paean of its seemingly boundless possibilities. In 
" Despair " the issue raised by the scientific thought of 
the day is faced with a merciless and unflinching power. 
If the world is Godless, and man but a better brute, our 
life is a cheat and a curse, and endurance of it intolerable 
and purposeless. Face this and end it. Here the ex- 



602 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

treme but logical conclusion of those who see nothing in 
the universe but matter and law, is thrust home on us 
in poetry of passion and of terror. Meanwhile, in such 
poems as "De Profundis" and "The Ancient Sage/' we 
see Tennyson's own conviction deepen that God and 
spirit are the eternal realities of the world. Poem after 
poem in Demeter, a book published just before the poet's 
death, turns on the mysterious relation of soul and body. 
It is the book of old age, written in the shadow of that 
night when no man can work. The servant body is fall- 
ing into ruin, but everywhere the triumph of the undying 
spirit over the failing flesh is triumphantly proclaimed. 
The body is "foul at best"; it is but "the house of a brute 
let to the soul of a man," and its office done, the man 
" stands on the heights of his life, with a glimpse of a 
height that is higher." * When he wrote Demeter, Ten- 
nyson had passed the allotted threescore years and ten. 
He was awaiting with a beautiful tranquillity and confid- 
ence the time when the door of this "goodly prison" 
should be opened. Death came to him gently, as the 
gracious and fitting close to a lofty life. The white mist 
hung low over the earth, but the room in which the 
poet lay was glorious in moonlight. Illuminated in its 
white radiance, a volume of Shakespeare in his hand, his 
finger still marking the dirge in Cymbeline which he had 
lately read, the Laureate passed peacefully out of this 
"bourne of time and space" 2 as one prepared to depart. 

Theodore Watts-Dunton has told us that there are 
poets of energy and poets of art 3 — poets, that is, whose 
predominant quality is original power, eruptive and irre- 
sistible as the volcanic discharge of molten lava, and poets 

1 "By an Evolutionist," in Demeter, and other Poems. 
8 "Crossing the Bar." Ibid. 

8 See the admirable and suggestive essay on "Poetry" in the 
Encyclopedia Britannica, ninth edition. 



TENNYSON. 603 

whose well ordered and less impulsive work bears the high 
finish of a refined and scrupulous art. In this age, Brown- 
ing admirably represents the poet of energy, 
work 78011 ' 8 while Tennyson stands no less emphatically as 
the poet of art. As a craftsman Tennyson has 
few superiors in our literature ; he approaches Milton in the 
perfection and excels him in the variety of his poetic work- 
manship. The Tennysonian style at its best has "an ex- 
treme subtlety and curious elaborateness of expression"; 1 
it has that intricacy of structure which points to extreme 
care and slowness in composition. While at times it can 
be terse and strong, or obtrusively simple and unadorned, 
its characteristic excellence is not compression or direct- 
ness. Tennyson's gift is neither the sublime reticence and 
conciseness of Dante, nor the limpid and indescribably 
moving simplicity of Wordsworth when he is at his best. 
Graceful, melodious, and tender, Tennyson breathes 
through silver rather than blows through bronze. While 
in Browning's masculine and rugged utterance the thinker 
obtrudes himself, so that inconsiderate readers are often 
led to undervalue the purely poetic excellence, in Tenny- 
son, through the very charm and perfection of his art, we 
are rather apt to underestimate the solid substratum of 
philosophic thought. We will therefore briefly consider 
Tennyson's poetry from this aspect in preference to dwell- 
ing on its obvious beauties. We will attempt to relate his 
work to those two new elements — the close communion 
with the life of Nature, the broader sympathy with the life 
of man — which we saw take their rise in the first quarter 
of the eighteenth century to become the motive force in 
the literature of modern times. As a poet of Nature Ten- 

1 Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer, p. 285 (Macmillan's 
edition). The student is advised to read carefully the analysis of 
Tennyson's style in this passage. Note particularly the distinction 
between the simplicite of Wordsworth and Tennyson's simplesse, p. 289. 



604 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

nyson is sometimes spoken of as the disciple of Words- 
worth, but in fact, while he resembles the older poet in 
Tennyson minuteness and accuracy of observation, in 
as a poet of other respects his attitude is fundamentally 
different. As we have said, to Wordsworth an 
Infinite Power was perpetually revealing itself, not merely 
through but in Nature. He believed that Nature pos- 
sessed a conscious life, and that 

"Every flower 
Enjoys the air it breathes." 

Tennyson, on the other hand, especially in his earlier 
work, is impressed with the order underlying the processes 
of Nature, with the "law which cannot be broken," and is 
not insensible, as was Wordsworth, to the aloofness and 
even apparent antagonism of Nature to man. In a word, 
Wordsworth's view of Nature is essentially mystical, and 
Tennyson's inherently scientific. To Wordsworth, more- 
over, as in "The Primrose and the Rock," Nature seems 
the unbroken revelation of divine love, while Tennyson, 
like Lucretius, Byron, and Leopardi, is not insensible to 
the mystery of her seeming cruelty and indifference. To 
the misanthropic hero of Maud, 

11 — nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; 
The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by the 

shrike," » 

the "whole little world" is "a world of plunder and prey." 
The conviction of Lucretius that man is but the puppet of 
mighty and impersonal agencies, produced and destroyed 
with equal indifference by the mechanical operation of 
purposeless laws of life, is recognised and combated in In 
Memoriam and "Despair." Tennyson quiets this paralys- 
ing fear by his unshakable trust in the faith and lofty intui- 
tions of man's soul, and by his assurance that the workings 

1 Maud, iv. stanza 4. 



TENNYSON, 605 

of Nature show an eternal purpose of progress, rather than 
the operation of blind and meaningless forces. He finds 
God 

"not in world or sun, 
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye," 1 

nor in "the freezing reason," but in man's capacity to feel. 
He opposes to Nature's apparent indifference and cruelty 
the doctrine of evolution. This doctrine, the greatest 
contribution to thought made by modern science, finds in 
Tennyson its poetic exponent; it is the very foundation- 
stone of his philosophy. 

In his feeling for Nature, Tennyson is thus as truly the 
poet of modern science as Wordsworth and Coleridge were 
of the German philosophy of their day, but he accepts the 
dogmas of science only to interpret them according to his 
own poetic and spiritual insight. 

Tennyson is no less distinctively the scientist in his views 
of human progress; he recognises a gradual and orderly de- 
Tendon velopment as the law alike of human society and 
as poet of of the material world. Byron's rebellious and 
ill-regulated clamour for liberty, Shelley's noble 
"passion for reforming the world" by some sweeping and 
unaccountable conversion of humanity, is succeeded by 
Tennyson's belief in that "moving upward" through the 
innumerable centuries whereby the beast in man is brought 
at length under the mastery of the spirit. In their youth 
Byron and Shelley saw liberty stricken down and bleeding 
through the reactionary power of conservatism; Tennyson, 
as a young man, witnessed the passage of the first Reform 
Bill (1832) and other hardly less important measures, by 
the strength of the reviving democracy; he beheld the peace- 
ful advance of liberty by the modification and through the 
agency of existing institutions. This gradual, legal, and 
definite progress he has from first to last consistently 
1 In Memoriam. cxxiv. 



606 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

represented. At the outset of his career he rejoices to see 
Freedom 

"Slowly broaden down 
From precedent to precedent." x 

At its close he pictures her as one who 

"like Nature, would'st not mar 
By changes all too fierce and fast 
This order of Her Human Star, 
This heritage of the past." 2 

Tennyson often touches on the social questions of his 
time: in The Princess on the rights of women; in a large 
group of poems, in which Maud, Aylmer's Field, and 
" Locksley Hall" are included, on social distinctions as a 
bar to marriage. But the noblest and most important ex- 
position of his views of human progress is found in the 
Idylls of the King. 

The Idylls of the King has been called a quasi epic. De- 
parting from the conventional epic form by its lack of a 
The idylls closely continuous narrative, it has yet that 
of the lofty manner and underlying unity of design 

mg * which lead us to class it with the epics, at least 

in the essentials. It consists of a series of chivalric legends, 
taken chiefly from the Morte d Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, 
grouped so as to exhibit the establishment, the greatness, 
and the downfall of an ideal kingdom of righteousness 
among men. " The Coming of Arthur," the ideal ruler, 
shows us the setting up of this kingdom. Before this, was 
disorder, great tracts of wilderness, 

"Wherein the beast was evei more and more, 
But man was less and less." 3 

Arthur slays the beast and fells the forest, and the old 

1 "You ask me why, tho' ill at ease." 

* Tiresias; " Freedom." See also "Politics" in Demeter. 

• "The Coming of Arthur." 



TENNYSON. 607 

order changes to give place to new. Then the song of 
Arthur's knights rises, a majestic chorus of triumph: 

"Clang battleaxe and clash brand! Let the King reign." 

In "Gareth and Lynette" the newly established king- 
dom is seen doing its work among men. Arthur, enthroned 
in his great hall, dispenses impartial justice. The knights 

"Ride abroad redressing human wrongs." 

The allegory shows us, in Gareth's contests with the 
knights "that have no law nor King," the contest of the 
soul with the temptations that at different periods of life 
successively attack it: 

"The war of Time against the soul of man." 1 

Then follow the Idylls, which trace the entrance and 
growth of an element of sin and discord, which spreading 
pulls down into ruin that "fellowship of noble knights," 
"which are an image of the mighty world." The purity 
of the ideal kingdom is fouled, almost at its source, by the 
guilty love of Lancelot and the queen. Among some the 
contagion spreads ; while others, in an extremity of protest, 
start in quest of the Holy Grail, leaving the duty at hand 
for mystical visions. Man cannot bring down heaven to 
earth, he cannot sanctify the mass of men by his own rap- 
turous anticipations; he cannot safely neglect the prelimi- 
nary stages of progress appointed for the race, he "may 
not wander from the allotted field before his work be 
done." 2 

So by impurity and by impatience the rift in the king- 
dom widens, and in "The Last Tournament," in the still- 
ness before the impending doom, we hear the shrill voice of 

1 "Gareth and Lynette." Note the significance of the entire pas- 
sage in which this line occurs. 
3 "The Holy Grail." 



608 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

Dagonet railing at the king ; who thinks himself as God, 
that he can make 

"honey from hornet-combs 
And men from beasts." 

In "Guinevere/' unequalled elsewhere in the Idylls in 
pure poetry, the blow falls; at length, in the concluding 
poem, Arthur passes to the isle of Avilion, and once more 

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new." l 

Tennyson himself tells us that in this, his longest poem, 
he has meant to shadow "sense at war with soul," 2 the 
struggle in the individual and in the race, between that 
body which links us with the brute and the soul which 
makes us part of a spiritual order. But the mastery of 
the higher over the lower is only obtained through many 
seeming failures. Wounded and defeated, the king ex- 
claims: 

"For I, being simple, thought to work His will, 
And have but stricken with the sword in vain; 
And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend 
Is traitor to my peace,, and all my realm 
Reels back into the beast, and is no more." 3 

But Arthur also half perceives the truth which it is the 
poet's purpose to suggest to us. It is short-sighted to 
expect the immediate sanctification of the race; if we are 
disheartened, striving to "work His will," it is because "we 
see not to the close." It is impossible that Arthur's work 
should end in failure — departing, he declares, " I pass, but 
shall not die," and when his grievous wound is healed, he 
will return. The Idylls of the King is thus the epic of evo- 
lution in application to the progress of human society. 
In it the teachings of In Memoriam assume a narrative 
form. 

1 "The Passing of Arthur." 

3 "To the Queen," epilogue to Idylls of the King. 

* "The Passing of Arthur." 



TENNYSON. 609 

"Move upward, working out the beast," 

may be taken as a brief statement of its theme; and we 
read in it the belief in the tendency upward and an assur- 
ance of ultimate triumph: 

" O, yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood ; 

That nothing walks with aimless feet; 

That not one life shall be destroy'd, 

Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete." * 

Tennyson, as the representative poet of Victorian Eng- 
land, is the poet of modern science. But he also represents 

that intense spirituality which was conspicu- 
andYcience ous ty present in that so-called mercantile and 

material time. With the scientist's deep percep- 
tion of the presence of law, he himself shared, as did Words- 
worth, in the visionary rapture of the mystics. For him, 
as for Arthur, the world of spirit veritably exists, more sub- 
stantial than the world of sense, but the barrier to our 
entrance is in our own limited powers. When the knights 
report the result of their search after the Grail, Arthur 
declares : 

"ye have seen what ye have seen " — 

each as much as his spiritual sight permitted him. Those 
with Gareth looking on the towers of Camelot, cry out in 
the disbelief of the materialist: 

"Lord, there is no such city anywhere, 
But all a vision." 

But the warder tells them that the city is spiritual and 
therefore real, seeing it 

"is built 
To music, therefore never built at all, 
And therefore built for ever." 

1 In Memoriam, LIV. 



610 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

Tennyson unites the modern grasp of physical truth with 
the apprehension of that spiritual element which permeates 
and sustains it, and to him, as his own Arthur, the 

"visions of the night or of the day- 
Come, as they will." l 

Appreciating, with the scientist, the law of the world of 
sense, he yet asks with the idealist: 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains, — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? " 3 

He yet points us to 

*' — that true world within the world we see, 
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore." 3 

While no recent English poet is so versatile and so broadly 
representative as Tennyson, Robert Browning (1812- 
1889) satisfied, as no other poet was able to do, 
Browning. some °f tne deepest spiritual needs of his gen- 
eration. From the first his genius was more 
bold, irregular, and independent than that of Tennyson, 
and he was less responsive to the changing moods of his 
time. Indeed, he rather proved its leader, taking his 
own way, unmoved by praise or blame, and at last com- 
pelling many to follow him. His work is highly charged 
with an abounding vigour and audacity characteristic of 
Browning himself. Mrs. Orr tells us that "his conscious- 
ness of health was vivid;" Bayard Taylor speaks of his 
"vigour and elasticity; " his handshake has been compared 
to an electric shock; and Mr. Sharp speaks of his "intensely 

1 "The Holy Grail." See the curious account of Tennyson's 
trances, or visions, in Waugh's Alfred, Lord Tennyson: a Study of His 
Life and Works. 

2 "The Higher Pantheism." 

3 De Profundis, ii. 1. Cf. } also, "The Ancient Sage." 



BROWNING. 611 

alive hand." Landor writes of him in lines crowded with 
suggestion: 

"Since Chaucer was alive and hale, 
No man hath walked along our roads with step 
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue 
So varied in discourse." * 

Such allusions bring Browning before us as the keenly ob- 
servant man of the world, alive to his very finger-tips, full 
of that robust and wholesome capacity for enjoyment which 
we associate with Chaucer and Shakespeare and Scott, 
but which among our modern men of letters is unfortu- 
nately rare. A knowledge of Browning's genial and 
aggressively active personality is of real value to one who 
would seize upon the spirit of his work. It is not an 
intrusive curiosity, but the spirit of the genuine student, 
which leads us to contrast Browning's superb equipoise 
with the lack of balance shown by so many of his contem- 
poraries ; to set his ready fellowship with men, his soundness 
of mind and of body, beside Rossetti's morbid life and im- 
perfect human sympathies, his insomnia, and his disordered 
nerves. Matthew Arnold found a partial relief from the 
"something that infects the world" in the patient calm of 
Nature, yet to his melancholy fancy earth and sky seemed 

"To bear rather than rejoice." 

But to Browning's inextinguishable hopefulness, God's 
"ancient rapture" in life and love and beauty is still 
visibly renewed in his world. 2 Like the happy child in 
Pippa Passes, he sang in a restless, doubting century, with 
its tired nerves and throbbing temples, the strange song of 
courage and of faith. 

" The year's at the spring 
And day's at the morn ; 
Morning's at seven ; 
The hill-side's dew-pearled ; 

1 Sonnet to Browning. 2 Paracelsus, Act v. 



612 VICTORIAN LITERATURE, 

The lark's on the wing; 
The snail's on the thorn; 
God's in His Heaven — 
All's right with the world." 

We are refreshed by a wholesome delight in the simple 
joy of living, that in the thin intellectual atmosphere of 
our civilisation, comes with a delicious flavour of the 
antique world. 

"O our manhood's prime vigour! no spirit feels waste, 
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced. 

How good is man's life the mere living, how fit to employ 
The heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy." x 

This strain of manly confidence, this overflowing force 
and vitality, is not faltering or exceptional, it is part of 
Browning's masculine and powerful genius, and of his 
wholesome and happy life. Courage and cheerfulness are 
inseparable from his fine physique, his massive breadth of 
character, his wide sympathies with man and Nature, his 
hearty pleasure in physical and intellectual activity. He 
had a strange fellowship with all living things, reaching 
down to the tiny creatures of the grass; he loved music 
and painting and sculpture, with a love developed by long 
study and intimate knowledge. The beauty of Italy, his 
chosen land, that he declared was his "university," early 
entered into his life and art, and besides all this he found, 
what men of genius rarely find, a woman of fine nature 
and answering genius capable of responding to his highest 
moods. 

There are few more beautiful love stories in our litera- 
ture than this. In an exquisite series of Sonnets, prob- 
ably her most perfect work, Mrs. Browning has told how 
Browning crossed the darkened threshold of her sick 
room, and how she knew that it was not death which 

1 Saul 



BROWNING. 613 

held her, but love. 1 And in One Word More, or By the 
Fireside, or in that exalted apostrophe in The Ring and 
the Book, 2 Browning pays an answering tribute to his 
"moon of poets." In thinking of Browning's unfaltering 
cheerfulness, we must remember that between his mar- 
riage to Miss Barrett in 1846 and her death in 1861, lay 
fifteen years, passed in the inspired air of Florence, of 
companionship as perfect as it was rare. Browning was 
one of the most prolific of all English poets. His work 
covers more than half a century of almost incessant pro- 
duction (Pauline, 1833 — Asolando, 1889), exhibiting in 
sheer bulk and intellectual vigour a creative energy hardly 
surpassed by any poet since Shakespeare. Written while 
England was passing through a time of spiritual despon- 
dency and fluctuating faith, Browning's poetry impresses 
us as some great cathedral, in which every part is duly 
subordinated to one symmetrical design, and consecrated 
to one ultimate purpose. It is independent and often 
eccentric in style; it is defiant of the prevailing theories of 
art; it rises solitary, abrupt, rugged, and powerful, from 
an age of fluent, graceful, and melodious verse. 

Browning, like Milton and Wordsworth, comes before 
us as a teacher, but our first consideration is naturally not 

the truth or value of his philosophy, but the 
as^arSrtf poetic quality of his work. It is as a poet that 

he has chosen to appeal to us, and it is prim- 
arily as poet and not as philosopher that his work must 
take its place in literature. The salt of poetry may pre- 
serve a poem the philosophy of which is trite or falla- 
cious, but it may be questioned whether any philosophy, 
however noble or invigorating, will secure it a permanent 
place in literature if it lack the poetic quality. Looked 

1 Sonnets from the Portuguese, i. 

3 See passage beginning "O lyric love," in The Ring and the Book 
at the close of Bk. i. 



614 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

at simply from the art side, few dispassionate readers will 
deny that Browning's poetry has serious defects. In 
many instances, more especially in the longer poems, the 
fine gold is debased by an alloy of versified prose; and 
long philosophic arguments, ingenious, subtle, and some- 
times wearisome, are thrust forward untransmuted by 
the poet's alchemy. It is probable that some such poems, 
for instance, the Red Cotton Nightcap Country (1873), while 
they may continue to hold a formal place in the literature, 
will cease to be read except by the curious or conscientious 
student. If Browning's verse is musical, its music is cer- 
tainly different from that with which the masters have 
made us familiar. Habitually spirited, it is often jolting 
and abrupt; full of parentheses and ejaculations, and 
moving by sudden starts and jerks. To the casual reader 
Browning often seems impatient of form in his anxiety 
to get the thing said; thoughts and feelings seem crowding 
and jostling together for utterance, and he seems only 
anxious to "hitch the thing into verse," that he may turn 
to something, new. His rhymes are apt to be fantastic 
and ludicrously ingenious to an extent unprecedented in 
serious poetry. The extravagances of Hudibras, of Beppo, 
and of the Fable jor Critics in this direction, are fairly out- 
done by Browning in the Old Pictures in Florence, or in 
Pacchiarotto. The last-named poem in particular is an 
unparalleled exhibition of rhythmical gymnastics. Eng- 
lish is racked and wrenched to the uttermost, and when 
it fails a Greek or Latin word is unceremoniously caught 
up and thrust in to take its place. It must further be 
admitted that Browning is at times obscure to a degree 
which even the difficulty of his subject does not justify, 
but this defect has been dwelt on to weariness, and usually 
with an unfortunate exaggeration. Indeed, a very large 
proportion of Browning's poetry presents no serious 
difficulty to an ordinarily attentive and unprejudiced 



BROWNING. 615 

reader; the complaint of obscurity comes most loudly 
from those whose knowledge of his work is slight, or from 
those who are so out of sympathy with his spirit that they 

"endure 
No light, being themselves obscure." 

Such obvious features of Browning's art have exposed it 
to an unfavourable criticism in which there is undoubtedly 
a proportion of truth. On the other hand, many unac- 
quainted with Browning's theory of art have been confi- 
dent that he had missed his mark when he had only failed 
to hit their mark, at which, in fact, he had never aimed. 
In an age when finish, smoothness, and melody were made 
the primary requisites in poetry, taste was naturally 
repelled by work distinguished by excellence of a very 
different order. We must remember that taste in such 
matters is largely influenced by custom, and that the gen- 
eration trained to delight in the heroic couplet found even 
the blank verse of Milton intolerably harsh. In a word, 
Browning's artistic merits are those which, as they were 
novel, his age was not trained to appreciate ; his defects 
are too often those to which training had made it the 
most sensitive. To enjoy Tennyson's work but little prep- 
aration was needed; the traditions of poetry were with 
him, and he completed or enlarged what others had begun. 
But Browning sought to conquer new regions for his art; 
like Wordsworth, he came distinctly as an innovator, and 
as such is within Wordsworth's rule, that every great and 
original poet must first create the taste by which he is to 
be enjoyed. 

It is doubtful whether Browning's purely poetic merit is 
even yet fully appreciated. He has a marvellous accuracy 
of observation, painting the revealing details of a situation 
with a phenomenal truth and vividness. In much descrip- 
tive poetry, beauty is gained at the expense of truth and 



616 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

reality; in Browning, beauty is habitually subordinated to 
truth and power. 

"A tap at the pane,, the quid:, sharp scratch- 
Arid blue spurt of a lighted match. 
And a voice less loud thro' its joys and fears 
Than the two hearts beating each to each," : 

These lines may not impress us as beautiful, but we 
must recognise in them a precision in the use of words, a 
felicitous correspondence of sound and sense, which mark 
the master of style. Again, the description in Christmas 
Eve of the congregation in the Methodist chapel is no more 
beautiful than an interior by Terriers, but it has the same 
inimitable minuteness and fidelity. In the same way. 
Browning's metaphors, while unusually original and ex- 
pressive, are often exact and striking rather than beautiful 
being employed as an actual help to our understanding. 2 
Many of Browning's longer poems, through the very wealth 
of his resources and through his erratic agility of mind. 
lack unity and directness; he is perpetually turned aside by 
the chance encounter with some tempting idea, so that we 
often leave the direct course for a kind of zigzag progress. 
On the other hand, he has given us poems, such, for in- 
stance, as "Martin Relph" and "Ivan Ivanovitch." which 
are masterpieces of strong and graphic narrative. In one 
province of poetry he is supreme — the dramatic mono- 
logue. 3 As triumphs of the poet's art such marvellous 

1 "Meeting at Night." 

2 See in illustration of this the metaphors in The Ring and the 
Book; see, also, conclusion to "Shah Abbas" in Ferishta's Fancies, 
where the difficulty of crossing a room in the dark without stumbling 
is likened to that in entering the heart of another without the lamp 
of love as a guide. 

8 A monologue or soliloquy, dramatic through the presence of some 
other person than the speaker, a presence inferred only from the words 
of the speaker himself. 



BROWNING. 617 

productions as "My Last Duchess/' "Andrea del Sarto," 
or " Fra Lippo Lippi " stand alone. It is as idle to say that 
such poems have not the sweetness or melody of Tennyson 
as it would be to complain that the "Lotus-Eaters" lacks 
Browning's invigorating power. On such a principle we 
might condemn Milton because he could not create a Fal- 
staff, or Shakespeare because he produced nothing similar 
to Paradise Lost. But above all we must remember that 
Browning's poems were written in accordance with what he 
regarded as the true function of art. In his view the high- 
est office of the poet, as of other artists, was to arouse, to 
sting into consciousness, the diviner side of man's nature. 
He teaches in "Andrea del Sarto" that something more 
than mere technical excellence is required for the produc- 
tion of the highest art; that it is better for the medium of 
expression to give way under the strain of thought and 
passion than for it to be coldly perfect because the soul is 
wanting. 1 The organist in " Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha " 
turns dissatisfied from the intricate, technical excellence of 
a fugue, to Palestrina, the composer who emancipated 
music from pedantic trammels and breathed into it a new 
soul. In "Old Pictures in Florence" we are taught that 
it is the mission of art to tantalise by its very incomplete- 
ness, rather than to satisfy by its perfection and repose; 
that the aim of the true artist is to arouse a longing for an 
unseen and eternal perfection, which no earthly similitude 
can ever fully reveal. Without this moral, or spiritual, 
element and purpose, art sinks into a mere sensuous satis- 
faction in colour and form, such as that shown by the cor- 
rupt bishop who ordered his tomb at St. Praxed's. In the 
bishop's dying directions for the adornment of his tomb we 
see how a refined delight in the mere externals of beauty 
and culture may go hand in hand with the moral depravity 
of a "low-thoughted" spirit. One may prefer Tully's 

1 Cf. Ruskin's theory of art, p. 544, supra. 



618 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

picked Latin to Ulpian, glory in the colours of marble and 
jasper, and design a frieze in which pagan nymphs dance 
through the most sacred scenes of Christian story, one may 
do all this and only demonstrate the radical insufficiency of 
the purely aesthetic view of art. 1 

Browning, then, does not set himself to manufacture 
"poetic confectionery": strength and suggestiveness, 
rather than beauty, are his primary objects, and conse- 
quently his poetry is not cloying or relaxing, but bracing, 
instinct to an extraordinary degree with moral invigora- 
tion. It is not intended to be taken as a mild form of 
opiate, but to "sting," as Browning himself tells us, "like 
nettle-broth." 2 Looking, therefore, at his poetry apart 
from its moral or philosophic value, it appears that Brown- 
ing's positive merits as an artist have been often under- 
valued because of the novelty of his methods and aims; 
because his peculiar excellences are distinctly different 
from those with which the tone of modern poetry has made 
us familiar. 

Browning's, optimism, of which we have already spoken, 
is not thoughtless but well grounded. ' Like Shakespeare, 
he does not seek to evade the melancholy and 
ateachef " perplexing aspects of life, but confronts and 
conquers the spectres of the mind. Like his 
own "Cleon," his sense of the inadequacy of life is keen, 
while he sees a "world of capability for joy spread round 
us," "tempting life to take." 3 Even his buoyant and 
healthy nature is stirred to the depths by the bitter com- 
pulsion of his time. We have compared him to Chaucer, 
but he is Chaucer surrounded by the subtleties and search- 
ings of nineteenth century thought; a profound and original 

1 "The Bishop orders his tomb at St. Praxed's." 
8 See Epilogue in Pacchiarotto, an important poem as a statement 
of Browning's view of his own work. Note especially last stanza. 
3 "Cleon." 



BROWNING. 619 

genius, facing in deadly earnest men's "obstinate question- 
ings" of life and of death. 

To Browning the only explanation of the mystery and 
the misery of this present life is to be found in its relation 
to a life to come. His view of life, like that of Carlyle, of 
Wordsworth, and of Tennyson, is essentially spiritual. 
To him God, the soul, and personal immortalit} 7 are the 
fundamental and all-important facts. 1 Wordsworth found 
an intimation of immortality in certain ideas or sympa- 
thies innate in the soul; Browning found a similar in- 
timation in the soul's inextinguishable longings and 
aspirations, which earth cannot satisfy and which witness 
to another life as the only adequate sphere of our activity. 
In a famous prose passage Browning has declared that 
nothing but the soul "is worth study." To him it is 
worth study because it only of things earthly will survive 
the temporal, because it sustains a definite relation to the 
eternal sphere of things. The development of the soul 
in this relation to the unseen is consequently the chief 
subject of Browning's work, as it is — in his judgment — ■ 
the supreme interest of life. Familiar as this thought 
may seem to us, by making it the essence of his delineation 
of life, Browning has virtually created poetry of a wholly 
new order. Shakespeare is the unapproached interpreter 
of the life of man on earth, but in his dramas life is revealed 
in no vital or necessary relation to a hereafter; encom- 
passed by darkness, it rather seems to us to be " rounded by 
asleep." Milton, projecting himself in imagination into 
a world where Shakespeare did not enter, has, on the con- 
trary, no real hold on the common or daily life of man. 2 
Browning's purpose to show us the seen in the light of the 
unseen is, almost as truly as Milton's, a thing " unattempted 

1 See "La Saisaiz" — passage beginning, "I have questioned, and 
am answered," etc. 

5 See comparison of Milton and Shakespeare, pp. 185-186, supra. 



620 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

yet in prose or rhyme." Shakespeare wrote in and for a 
bustling world, and his characters are shown to us in action. 
Browning wrote when life was outwardly more tame and 
conventional, and inwardly more complex; when the chief 
interest of man was not action but thought. Accordingly, 
as we might expect, Browning's dramatic power is of 
another order from that of the Elizabethans ; he has a fine 
feeling for the striking elements of a situation, but his 
characters reveal themselves less through action than 
through thought. He is at his best when, in some moment 
of spiritual crisis, he makes a soul describe its inmost 
nature; he admits us to the inward struggle, intellectual or 
moral, often leaving us to infer its declaration in outward 
act. These words of George Eliot, wno often worked like 
Browning in this hidden region of thought, help us to 
realise the peculiar difficulty of the task : " For Macbeth's 
rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite 
things in the same moment referred to the clumsy neces- 
sities of action, and not to the subtle possibilities of feeling. 
We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we 
cannot kill and not kill in the same moment ; but a moment 
is room wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for 
the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp back- 
ward stroke of repentance. " * 

An appreciation of Browning's skill as an interpreter of 
such dubious or complex moods must be gained by repeated 
study of his dramatic monologues. We can here only 
attempt to indicate some of the main points in his teaching. 

As life here is to be looked at as a preparation for life 
hereafter, and this world as the divinely appointed forcing 
house of the soul, experiences are important chiefly as 
they forward or retard the soul's growth. Joy is one 
element in the soul's development, for Browning's whole 
view of life is essentially the reverse of ascetic ; yet the more 

1 Daniel Deronda, vol. i. chap. iv. 



BROWNING. 621 

fully we develop all our faculties, the more inherently 
inadequate life becomes. It is through this very inade- 
quacy that the soul is taught to set its affections elsewhere. 
In Browning emotion is one great agency in breaking up 
our narrow and complacent contentment. He teaches 
us to prize moments of intense feeling and aspiration — 
moments like that in which "Abt Vogler" was enabled 
through music to transcend our temporal limitations — 
as times of escape when the soul learns to breathe in a 
purer air. It is the mission of the artist, the supreme 
expressor and interpreter of emotion, to awaken such 
aspiration, and hence the necessity — according to Brown- 
ing's view — of soul, and stimulus to soul, in the truest 
art. So, earthly love may prove, as in " By the Fireside, " 
a high emotion which shall forward the soul's progress; 
and so, too, as in "Youth and Art," the sacrifice of it to 
sordid ambition may stunt the spiritual progress of two 
lives. Browning is thus not only original and daring in 
method, but in aim; and whatever we may think of the 
poetic quality of his work, his view of life is the most 
spiritual and stimulating of any English poet, not except- 
ing Milton. 

The great mass of Browning's work makes any more 
specific criticism of it impossible here. It is doubtful 
whether in any one of Browning's dramas he 
WoA Un8 ' S re ally meets the requirements of the stage; 
yet, while he is not a dramatist, a large pro- 
portion of his poems, monologues, idyls, or lyrics, are as 
distinctly dramatic in spirit as in form. As closet dramas 
his plays have conspicuous merit, but as a rule his best work 
is found in his shorter poems. Men and Women (1855) 
contains many of the best of these, but characteristic 
masterpieces are scattered through his books, down to 
"Rephan" in Asolando (1889). The Ring and the Book 
(1868), a huge psychological epic of more than twenty- 



622 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

one thousand lines, remains, after all deductions, one of 
the most considerable and surprising poetic achievements 
of the century. We have spoken of this poem as an epic, 
but only for lack of an exacter word; in reality it is rather 
a series of dramatic monologues in which the same story is 
retold by different speakers; it is epic only by its length 
and by the underlying unity of its design. Browning's 
most ambitious, if not his greatest work, is thus a modi- 
fication of his chosen poetic form. 

With an intellectual force comparable to Dryden's, a 
moral ardour equal to that of Milton, Browning, too, is 
poet as well as thinker and teacher. He is no mere 
reasoner in verse, but the most profoundly passionate 
singer of his time. Through all his work there shines the 
noble spirituality, the marvellous subtlety, the strenuous 
earnestness of a great nature. Back of all stands the man, 
Robert Browning, who sings of himself, in words which 
are at once an epitaph and a closing song of triumph, as 

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 

Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph, 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake." l 

Thus in this great English poet of a late day we find 
that deep religious earnestness, that astounding force, 
which we noted in those obscure English tribes who nearly 
fifteen centuries ago began to possess themselves of the 
island of Britain. It is, indeed, this sound and vigorous 
character of the English race, underlying all the long cen- 
turies of its literary history, which gives a profound unity 
to all it has created. Browning's " Prospice," that daunt- 
less challenge to death from one who " was ever a fighter," 
repeats, in its cadence and spirit, poetry that comes to us 
from the dimly seen and far-off childhood of our race. If 
in the nineteenth century men bartered and sold, and 

1 Epilogue in Asolando, Browning's last poem. 



THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 623 

offered sacrifice to the Britannia of the market-place, it is 
still true that the great problems of existence were never 
dwelt upon with more earnestness, and that the greatest 
voices of the literature were calling them with a new ardor 
to the eternal and the unseen. 

The Victorian Age has passed into history to take its 
place beside the great literary epochs of the past. Its 
burning issues have grown cold; its fierce controversies, 
its characteristic teachings, its literary style and standards, 
have already become remote and unfamiliar 'to the present 
generation. Tennyson already seems to many hardly more 
modern than Wordsworth, and Dickens almost as far from 
the life of to-day as Jane Austen or Scott. 

Yet remote as it may seem, we are still too near to the 
Victorian Age to see it in a just perspective, and to esti- 
mate fairly its total contribution to the nation's life and 
literature. Some of us, on the one hand, grew up under 
the spell of the great Victorian writers, while on 
Victorian ^ th erj the tastes and ideals of many among 
us have been formed in a later age, when men 
were carried away by a violent reaction against Victorian 
ideals. We cannot yet look back to a time so closely 
bound to our own without some prejudice and partizan- 
ship, yet every year that passes helps us to see it more 
impartially, and to understand more fully its place in 
history. 

We look back upon it as a time when England, an 
instinctively conservative nation, was racked and stimu- 
lated by a spirit of change. The Victorian Age was the 
product and continuation of the England of the eighteenth 
century, and from the latter half of that century, the spirit 
of modern democracy and the inventions and teachings of 
modern science were forcing a people that clung to the 
past to abandon old ways for new. Under the driving 
power of the modern spirit, England, as we have seen, 



624 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

took her place in all but name, among the great democratic 
nations of the world. 1 

To a nation so deeply rooted in the past, these swift and 
comprehensive changes could not but bring some measure 
of bewilderment, dismay, and regret. The Victorian Age 
is, therefore, not merely an age of change, but an age of 
desperate conflict between the old and the new order, be- 
tween the old faith and the new science, — a conflict 
which has left a lasting impress on Victorian literature. 

While all this was taking place at home*, England was 
widening and seeking to consolidate that world-wide colo- 
nial empire which had been growing in strength and 
importance since the victories of Plassey and Quebec. 2 

Victorian literature records the conflicting interests, the 
changing standards, of this crowded and many-sided time. 
The spirit of the new democracy enters into its fiction, and 
the feudal and old-world romances of Scott give place to 
Dickens' large-hearted sympathy with the doings 
of the tradesman, the struggling actor, the dress- 
maker and the city clerk. Besides changing the tone of the 
novel, democracy helped to give works of fiction a larger place 
in the people's life. With the advance of democracy came 
more schools, more readers, and an ever increasing demand 
for popular books. Next to the daily papers and the lighter 
periodicals, the novel makes the least demand upon the 
intelligence and attention of the reader. The novel is the 
most attractive form of literature to the half-educated 
millions; it need not surprise us, therefore, that the un- 
precedented popularity and influence of the novel was a 
characteristic feature of the advancing- democracy of the 
Victorian Age. Nor is Victorian fiction remarkable merely 
because of its enormous extent. Dickens, Thackeray, 
George Eliot, Hardy, and Meredith, hold a place among 
the great masters of the English novel. Such masterpieces 
1 See p. 517, supra. 2 See p. 397, supra. 



THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 625 

of historical fiction as Henry Esmond, The Cloister and the 
Hearth, John Inglesant, and Lorna Doom; such novels as 
David Copper field, Middlemarch, The Return of the Native, 
and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, are enough to give dis- 
tinction to any age. 

The Victorian Age was the age of democracy ; it was 
also preeminently the age of science. We associate Dar- 
win with Sir Isaac Newton and with the greatest scientific 
discoverers of all time ; while such scientists and philoso- 
phers as Lyell, Wallace, Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, and 
Huxley, indicate the importance of the Victorian era in 
the intellectual progress of the world. The work of the 
scientist lies, for the most part, outside of the strict limits 
of literature, but Thomas Huxley is remarkable among 
scientific writers for the force and clearness of his literary 
style. 

It is probable that the Victorian Age will stand out in 
literary history as a period of great prose, equal, if not 
superior, to the age of Swift, Addison, and Steele. It was 
distinguished for its historians, and its literary critics, as 
well as for its scientists and writers of fiction, and in Car- 
lyle, Newman, Ruskin, Arnold, and Pater, it produced 
some of the greatest masters of English prose. In poetry, 
the Victorian Age must yield to the Elizabethan, but in 
prose, the age of Ruskin and Carlyle may confidently chal- 
lenge comparison with the age of Hooker and Bacon. 

Illustrious in prose, the age of Tennyson and Browning, 
Arnold and Swinburne, was also notable in poetry. Of the 
general character of this poetry we have already spoken ; 1 
to go further and attempt to estimate its permanent value, 
or to compare it with that of other epochs, would lead us 
into mere speculation. After the middle of the century, 
romanticism and the aesthetic theories of Keats gained 
in popularity and importance with the rise of Rossetti, 

1 See pp. 581-582, supra. 



626 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 

Morris, and the other' Pre-Raphaelites, but on the whole 
Victorian poetry is serious, even despondent, in tone, and 
profoundly concerned with the spiritual issues of the time. 
The soul of the Victorian Age, its doubts, its hopes, its 
struggles, lives on in its poetry; the outward body of the 
age — its manners, its speech, its costume, all the visible 
background of its life — survives almost wholly in its 
prose. In no age of the literature does the poet tell us 
more about the inner, and less about the outward and vis- 
ible life of his time. This revelation of spiritual experi- 
ences shows us Victorian England painfully labouring to 
adjust herself to the changes that democracy and science 
were making in man's familiar world. 

So far we have spoken of the Victorian Age as a whole, 
but it must not be assumed that its spirit and its literature 
remained the same from first to last. More than eighty 
years lie between the publication of Tennyson's juvenile 
poems in 1827, and the death of Swinburne, the last great 
Victorian poet, in 1909. During the latter part of this 
long period the tone of literature was changing, 

ideTif™ a * d while Tenn y so ^ Browning, Carlyle, Rus- 
kin and other writers lived to carry on the earlier 
Victorian ideals into the later years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, new writers, Rossetti, Swinburne, Meredith, and 
Hardy, brought into the later Victorian literature a very 
different spirit. We may differ about the comparative 
greatness of the early and later Victorian writers, but we 
must air recognize the different spirit that animates their 
work. We may think Swinburne a greater poet than 
Tennyson, but we will hardly contend that the poet of 
The Garden of Proserpine is as hopeful as the poet of 
Crossing the Bar. Rossetti may be a greater poet than 
Browning, but, if we know the difference between an ano- 
dyne and a tonic, we will not suppose him to be as whole- 
some, as hopeful, as inspiring, or as manly. Hardy may 



CHANGING IDEALS. 627 

be a greater novelist than Dickens, but the boldest would 
hardly say that his novels are as cheerful, as consoling, or 
as kindly. Evidently the later Victorian literature betrays 
a loss of faith, of hope, and of a manly courage and forti- 
tude. To many, God is no longer in His heaven, and all is 
wrong with the world. Some "love beauty only" and 
proclaim art the supreme interest in life ; some seek to fill 
the short day of existence with the greatest number of 
intense and pleasurable sensations ; some seek a new reli- 
gion in the service of man and in a belief in his earthly 
progress. Men are more selfish, depressed or rebellious, 
and the old joyous zest in life and its wholesome activi- 
ties grows more rare. For the time English literature has 
lost that manly resolution, that large-hearted good-humour, 
which sustains and braces us in the pages of Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, and Browning, of Fielding, Dickens, and Scott. 
If one would feel the difference between the temper of 
the earlier and later Victorians, let him contrast those two 
studies of boyhood, Tom Brown's School Days (1857), and 
Pater's Child in the House (1878), and picture what would 
have happened to that aesthetic child in Arnold's Rugby. 

Whatever may be the verdict of time on the purely lit- 
erary eminence of the Victorian Age, it was a vitally 
important period in the life of England and in the up- 
building of the British Empire, and we cannot doubt that 
the literature through which such a period reveals itself 
will have a lasting value. With all its apparent confu- 
sion, Victorian literature, as we now look back to it, 
gradually assumes a certain unity and meaning, as we see 
that, with all its divisions and contradictions, it was the 
memorable expression of a time of questioning and of 
growth, during a critical stage of the nation's life. 



CHAPTER III. 
THE NEW ERA. 

(Cm. 1880-Cir. 1915.) 

While the Victorian Age had a certain unity, this is 
largely because the writers who gave it its distinctive 
character at the beginning continued to dominate it almost 
to its close. The later writers, ■ — Rossetti, Swinburne, 
Pater, Hardy, and Meredith, — who grew up under the 
supremacy of the earlier leaders, while they belong in point 
of time to the Victorian Age, were also the literary fore- 
runners of a still later day. To understand the literature 
of this recent England we must study it as the outcome 
and continuation of the literature of the later rather than 
of the earlier Victorian Age. We must see in these later 
writers, the .precursors of a new age, just as in the eight- 
eenth century, we saw the rise and growth of Romanticism, 
under the classic regime of Pope or Johnson. While Ten- 
nyson and Browning, the veteran poets of an early Victorian 
England, were still singing of God, duty, and immortality, 
their eager successors, sons of a very different time, were 
already beginning to push aside the survivors of the passing 
generation, and to attack some of its most cherished ideals. 

From about 1880, or during the twenty years that pre- 
ceded the death of the Queen, the Victorian Age was 
slowly dying. During these last years of the 
an Era ° nineteenth century, the surviving leaders of 
Victorian England were passing from the scene 
of their labours. Carlyle, George Eliot, and Disraeli died 
in 1881; Darwin, Rossetti, and Trollope died in 1882; 

628 



NEW WRITERS. 629 

Matthew Arnold in 1888; Robert Browning in 1889. 
The next decade saw the deaths of Newman, Tennyson, 
Freeman, Froude, Pater, Stevenson, Huxley, William Mor- 
ris, and Gladstone. Ruskin, the last of the great Victorian 
masters of prose, died in 1900, and the passing of Queen 
Victoria in the first year of the new century, seemed to 
give a definite ending to an age that already was fast 
receding into history. Finally, in 1909, with the deaths of 
the later Victorians, Swinburne and George Meredith, the 
break with Victorian England became practically complete. 
Meanwhile there was an insistent clamour and confusion 
of new voices : much was said and written about new 
schools and new doctrines of art, and new writers were 
rapidly coming forward to replace the old. Be- 

Writers. tween 1880 and 1890 > we have the rise of Wil " 
liam Watson, Oscar Wilde, R. L. Stevenson, 

H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Mrs. Humphrey 
Ward, John Davidson, W. E. Henley, and William Butler 
Yeats. The next decade saw the entrance of Stephen 
Phillips, Francis Thompson, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. 
Wells, and John Galsworthy, while the early years of the 
twentieth century gave G. K. Chesterton, Alfred Noyes, 
and John Masefield. These are but a few of the more 
familiar names in poetry, fiction, and the drama, yet they 
will serve to suggest to us the extent and variety of the 
literature that has grown up during the last years of Vic- 
toria's reign, and since its close. Many of the writers 
just named are still living; some are in the early fresh- 
ness of their influence ; others have already fallen into 
comparative, if temporary neglect: upon none of them 
can time be said to have passed an authoritative verdict. 
But while the place of these writers in literature is still 
uncertain, a glance at some of the most distinctive features 
of the recent period to which they belong will help us 
gain a clearer idea of it as a whole. 



630 THE NEW ERA. 

In the midst of the change of literary fashions, which 
became increasingly evident in what has been called " the 
stormy 80's," a few writers have upheld the traditions of 
the earlier Victorian time. In the novel, William de 
Morgan (1839-1917) recalled the genial humour and broad 
human sympathy of Dickens, by his stories of the strug- 
gles and experiences of people of the poorer and middle 
The Con- classes ; while Archibald Marshall (1866- 
servative ), following in the footsteps of Trollope, 

Writers. ma d e that charming bit of English country of 
which Exton Manor is the centre, as real, and as dear to 
our hearts, as B arches ter, or Cranford. 

In poetry, the elevation, dignity, and classic restraint of 
the older poetry were sustained, during an over-wrought 
and undisciplined period, by the Yorkshire poet William 
Watson (1858- ). Watson's first long poem, The 
Prince's Quest (1880), has a superficial resemblance to 
the stories in Morris's Earthly Paradise, but it is animated 
by a very different spirit. It is the story of a life-long 
struggle to attain an eternal perfection, a land of Heart's 
Desire, and so to realize the visions of one's youth. It is 
not a poem of ease and languorous forgetfulness, like The 
Earthly Paradise, but of renunciation, suffering, 
endurance, faith, and fulfilment. Since this early 
venture in narrative poetry, Watson has devoted himself 
almost altogether to verse of a more purely lyrical and medi- 
tative character. He has made poetry the vehicle of literary 
criticism, and his verdict on poetry and poets in many of 
his epigrams and elegies are marvels of critical insight and 
felicitous expression. He showed his old-fashioned rever- 
ence for Tennyson in one of the best-known of his elegies, 
Lachrymal Musarum (1890) ; his love for Wordsworth in 
Wordsworth' 's Grave; while his deep-rooted belief in the 
great poetic traditions of the past are everywhere manifest 
in his poetry and in his prose. His elegies, his scholastic 



THE CONSERVATIVES. 631 

flavour and literary finish, lead us to associate him with 
Matthew Arnold, while by his political sonnets he is not 
unworthy to be named with Milton and Wordsworth 
among the great political sonneteers of England. Wat- 
son's feet are thus planted firmly on the ancient ways. At 
a time when the Muse lounged or rioted in dishabille, he 
wore the poet's classic robes, and if we find in him some 
lack of passionate abandon, we find the early eighteenth 
century virtues of clearness, precision, and restraint. At 
a time when- England, under the spell of Disraeli, was 
full of projects for imperial expansion, Watson furiously 
assailed the imperial polic} r , and later espoused the cause 
of the Boers in the Boer war. 

Traces of Tennyson's influence are found in some of the 
works of Stephen Phillips (1864-1915), a young poet 
who began to write in 1890, and who gained a sudden 
and extraordinary reputation which he failed to 
p8 ' maintain. His Marpessa (1890) may be grouped 
with Tennyson's classical studies, especially with Tithonus, 
because of the similarity of its theme and the turn of its 
verse. But Phillips wrote verse on modern subjects of a 
very different character, and turned later to the drama to 
win a dazzling but temporary success. 

A still more recent poet, Alfred No yes (1880- ), 
has, on the whole, remained aloof from metrical innova- 
tions, and changing poetic fashions. We should 
hesitate to label him as the follower of any one 
Victorian master, but his work is in general accord with the 
poetic traditions of the past. 

While a few writers were thus more or less successfully 
maintaining the traditions of Dickens, Tennyson, and the 
Early- Victorian time, others were following in the wake of 
Rossetti, Swinburne, and Pater, and by exaggerating their 
methods and pushing their theories of beauty to an extreme 
if logical conclusion, were bringing the Pre-Raphaelite 



632 • THE NEW ERA. 

style and standards into ridicule and contempt. The 
centre of this group in the early 80's was the spectacular 

young Irishman, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), 

the founder of the so-called "aesthetic school." 
Wilde was a brilliant talker, a good classical scholar, a 
master of paradox, and — like many moderns — a success- 
ful self-advertiser. He was proclaimed as "the Apostle 
of Beauty," and he declared that " an ethical sympathy in 
an artist is an unpleasant mannerism of style." He inti- 
mated that the smile of beauty is to be preferred to the 
glory of Waterloo. Although these ideas were exploited 
by Wilde in an extreme and eccentric fashion, they were at 
least as old as Keats. Wilde posed as the founder of a 
new school, but, at least in his early poetry and criticism, 
he was rather among the last survivors of an old one. 
While he lingered in his garden of dreams, others were 
beginning to turn with relief to that world of every-day 
fact which the romanticists had ignored. The poet had 
heard enough of poppies and lilies, of yellow-haired demoi- 
selles, of aureoles and dulcimers, and of the flutes of 
Arcady. The theatrical " properties " and the familiar 
phraseology of the Pre-Raphaelites began to seem conven- 
tional and out-worn. So when Kipling, shortly after 
Wilde's advent, made his startling entrance into literature, 
poetry was ready to leave her Palace of Art and come 
down to the plain to mix with men. 

We are thus brought to the leading characteristic of 
this recent period, a widespread revolt against the thought 
and the literary fashions of the Victorian time. While 
there were a few, like Watson, who preserved the tradi- 
tions of the past ; while there were others, like Wilde, who 

carried on for a time the fashions of the later 
The Reac- Victorian poets, the general impulse was to bring 

in something new. In the closing years of the 
nineteenth century, a new England was coming into life, 



IMPERIALISM. 633 

restlessly eager for some new thing, contemptuous of her 
old prophets, and tired of her old ways. The representa- 
tives of this new England neglected and belittled nearly 
every one of the Early- Victorian writers, and to them, 
" Early- Victorian " and " Mid- Victorian " were terms of 
reproach. They turned their backs on the past, and repu- 
diated the characteristic beliefs and standards of the Vic- 
torians'as insincere, narrow, trivial, and outgrown. This 
reaction in literature was simply the expression of a wide 
change in the nation itself, and in the violence of the 
national revolt, the old was often attacked because it was 
old, and the new welcomed simply because it was new. In 
literature, this passion for change showed itself in many 
different ways, and while there was a natural tendency to 
push innovations to the extreme, the movement had in it 
much that was vigorous and full of promise. , 

This reaction brought a more robust and stirring spirit 
into literature - ^ it revived the normal, the masculine, the 
x . . primitive ; it rudely shattered dreams and lan- 
ism and guors, and turned poetry to plain facts and to 
Realism. common sense. Since the victory of Napoleon, 
and all through the reign of Victoria, English colonial pos- 
sessions had been increasing in extent and in importance 
and countless Englishmen had left home to begin life 
again under strange, and often wild and perilous, surround- 
ings. In 1875, Disraeli prepared the way for England's 
influence in Egypt by the purchase of shares in the Suez 
canal; in 1876, Victoria was made Empress of India; and 
at the end of the century came the Boer war. During all 
these years the consciousness of this greater Britain was 
taking hold of the national imagination. In India, Aus- 
tralia, and Africa, England was building up or widening 
the bounds of her empire, and towards the close of the 
nineteenth century the strong, adventurous life of the col- 
onies and of the wild places began to make itself felt in 



634 THE NEW ERA. 

English literature. So, after centuries of comparative in- 
sularity, we come to a time when English literature was not 
merely the literature of the British Isles, but the literature 
of the British Empire. 

This growing pride in Imperial Britain found a spokes- 
man in the spirited verse and vigorous stories of the young 
Anglo-Indian journalist, Rudyard Kipling 
(1865- ), who was welcomed as "the laure- 
ate of Empire." Kipling brought India to England. Not 
the historic, unfathomable India, revealed in the eloquence 
of Burke and the rolling sentences of Macaulay, but India 
as it was known to the English government official, and to 
the soldier in the ranks. The intimate, familiar happen- 
ings of Anglo-Indian life, the very slang of Tommy Atkins, 
were set down with little attempt at suppression or adorn- 
ment in Departmental Ditties (1886), Barrack Room Ballads 
(1891-93), Plain Tales from the Hills (1887), and Soldiers 
Three. In 1889, Kipling, a son of England, born in Bom- 
bay, came to London to find himself famous. Kipling did 
more than bring India "within the horizon of the average 
Englishman; -he was a cosmopolitan, and he did much to 
widen the home-loving Englishman's outlook on the world. 
He declared: — 

" What should they know of England, who only England know." 

He was above all the poet of imperialism, of the doctrine 
that it was England's mission to carry her flag to the ends 
of the earth. 

" Fair is our lot — O goodly is our heritage! 
(Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!) 
For the Lord our God Most High 
He hath made the deep as dry, 
He hath smote us for a pathway to the ends of all the earth!" 

Many others besides Kipling were renewing in England 
the spirit of youthful courage and adventure, that old zest 
in living, which we miss in the thin intellectuality of Arnold, 



NEW WRITERS. 635 

or in the melancholy dream-world of the romanticists. 

Arnold had pictured England as a "weary Titan"; in these 

latter years of the century the colonies were 

Adventure. . . , , , . £ ., . , , 

giving her something 01 their young hope and 
strength. A host of novelists, some of them natives of the 
colonies, were delighting the spirit of adventure that still 
lives on in most of us, by their stories of perils by field and 
flood. H. Rider Haggard (1856- ), who had been 
in the colonial service in the Transvaal, Olive Schriner, 
and others, led their readers into the heart of Africa. 
Australia, who had already given a poet to English litera- 
ture in Adam Lyndsay Gordon, and a novelist in 
Marcus Clarke, found its chroniclers in such writers as 
Ernest William Hornung. Canada, too, had its grow- 
ing literature, while the distant islands and the green 
corners of the earth found their interpreters in Henry 
Seton Merriman, H. de Vere Stackpoole, and Joseph 
Conrad (preeminent among the prose-poets of the sea). 
It was in 1882, the year of the death of Rossetti, that 
Stevenson 1 published his Treasure Island, and it was 
Stevenson's friend Henley, who sang a song to England 
that vibrates with the defiant patriotism of this time : — 

" When shall the watchful sun, 
England, O England, 
Match the master-work you've done, 
England, my own?" 

Another poet of Empire, Henry John Newbolt (1862- 
), touched the heart of the nation by his Admirals 
All (1897), a book of stirring verse celebrating England's 
supremacy on the sea. The verse of such poets as 
Rossetti, Arnold, and Wilde hardly reached beyond the 
narrow limits of cultured and literary circles; the poems of 
Kipling and Newbolt, dealing nobly with intensely human 
and national themes, made their way among the people, 
1 See p. 576 supra. 



636 THE 1STEW ERA. 

and Newbolt's songs were "sung by camp fires" and his 
books read in military hospitals. Both Newbolt and Kip- 
ling were poets of the Empire, but each sang of it in his 
own way. In Newbolt there is a solemnity and tenderness, 
which is lacking in the rough realism of Kipling's swing- 
ing verse. Such poems as Clifton Chapel and The Only 
Son are less daring and original, perhaps, than Danny 
Deever or Fuzzy Wuzzy but the strain is "of a higher 
mood." Newbolt, too, writes of Empire not as a patriotic 
colonial, but as one whose earliest and dearest memories 
bind him to English soil. His thoughts are with England 
when he looks abroad over her distant possessions. The 
spirit of Wellington's saying that "the victory of Waterloo 
was won on the playing fields of Eton" is the inspiration 
of many of Newbolt's poems. He shows us England, the 
mother, training and sending forth her sons; he shows us 
the soldier, bred in English schools, fighting, perhaps dying, 
for England's empire, strong to the end through memories 
of boyhood and of home. 

Other writers, although not greatly concerned with im- 
perialism or strange adventures, were escaping from the 
flimsy world of the sesthetes and bringing poetry back into 
a closer and more normal relation to common life. Since 
the Muse had fled to the fields in the eighteenth century, 
London had hardly had a good word from the poets. The 
outward aspects of London, the life of her teeming streets, 
had been almost entirely passed over by poets since the 
time of Pope and Gay. Now, in this return of the poet to 
reality, modern London reappears in poetry in the verse of 
William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), a 

Henlev • 

struggling journalist, and in John Davidson. 

In Henley's London Voluntaries (1892), our eyes are 

opened to the beauty of the greatest of modern cities, that 

we so often see only in its more sordid, grimy, or tragic 

aspects. The union of reality and true romance, the con- 






DAVIDSON. 637 

secration of the familiar, in these poems recall Words- 
worth's revelation of the natural beauty of London in his 
sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge. The dingy 
streets are transfigured by the luminous glory of the 
October sunshine; Trafalgar Square, with its couchant 
lions and volleying fountains, is filled with the "golden 
glory"— 

" And the high majesty of Paul's 
Uplifts a voice of living light, and calls — 
Calls to his millions to behold and see 
How goodly this his London Town can be! " 

These studies throw a glamour over a great typical centre 
of modern life, but in some of his earlier verses, recording 
his own impressions and experiences in a hospital in Edin- 
burgh, Henley shows us the stark fact with unshrinking 
fidelity. 

An even greater determination to face and declare the 
ugly and tragic realities of life, stripped bare of all soften- 
ing illusion, was seen in Davidson's powerful but often 
eccentric verse. Davidson was more than a realist: in his 
defiance of long-established customs and beliefs, in his pas- 
sion to destroy the old, and his eagerness to bring in the 
new, he was the very embodiment of the spirit of revolt 
and unrest, so characteristic of his time. Born in 1887, 
at Barrhead, a factory town near Glasgow, noted for its 
print-works and cotton mills, John Davidson a Lowland 
Scot, came of a hard-headed, serious-minded, disputatious 
race. He was a poet trained to be a scientist, 
and born into an age of science, scepticism, and 
machinery. At thirteen he worked in the chemical labo- 
ratory of a sugar house, later he was clerk in a Glasgow 
thread firm. This poet of our modern world did not fol- 
low his plough upon the mountain-side, as Burns once did 
in neighbouring Ayrshire; he grew up in the midst of chem- 
icals, ship-yards, and engine works, and it was not the lark 



638 THE NEW ERA. 

but the steam whistle that called him to his work. Drawn 
by a deep love of literature, and by the true Scotch desire 
to argue and to preach, he came to London in 1890, to 
seek a living by his pen. He had a love of Nature, — at 
times a true and fresh vision of her, — he had a pity for the 
industrial worker and the poor. He had been moulded by 
the new science and the new thought, and he was in bit- 
ter rebellion against the old order and the old creeds. 
These things, Nature, science, and the life of the poor and 
the outcast in the great industrial centres, enter into and 
give distinction to many of his best poems. He is the poet 
of modern London in his Fleet Street Eclogues, as Henley 
is in his London Voluntaries, although in a very different 
fashion. He was an experimentalist, a seeker after ob- 
scure words and strange theories, but he was forlornly 
brave and desperately in earnest, and there is a strain of 
genuine poetry in his best work. 

Such poets as Kipling, Henley, and Davidson were 
pioneers in the effort to bring poetry closer to the living 
interests of the average man, to show the sacredness of 
those things which men call common, and so win back a 
kingdom lost to art by the influence of Keats. Such an 
effort was not a new thing; it was essentially a return to 
that view of poetry held and proclaimed by Crabbe and 
Wordsworth. Wordsworth declared: 

"The common-growth of mother-earth 
Suffices me — her tears, her mirth, 
Her humblest mirth and tears." l 

It is essentially this feeling, however differently expressed, 
that is coming back to us in some of our best 
Eeaiists. recent poetry. Under all outward differences, 
we recognize it in the work of Wilfked Wil- 
son Gibson (1878- ) and of John Masefield 
(1875- '), the poet of The Everlasting Mercy, The 
1 Prologue to Peter Bell. 



THE NOVEL. 639 

Widow in the Bye Street (1911-12), and Dauber, some- 
times called Tlie Story of a Round House. 

While this deeper sympathy with poverty, ignorance, 
and pain was thus changing poetry, it was also manifest- 
ing itself in many other ways. The democratic ideals of 
an earlier time no longer satisfied a generation that was 
beginning to look forward to a more radical social change. 
Societies like the Democratic Federation (1881), the Social- 
ist League (1884), and the Fabyan Society (c. 1888) 
sprang up for the study or promotion of socialistic ideas. 
The influence of these ideas on thought, legislation, and 
literature became increasingly evident. The earlier Vic- 
torian literature expressed the ideals of democracy; the 
later literature revealed more of that smoulder- 
ing resentment, that desire for a new social 
order, which characterized the new time. The ferment 
of these new ideas was seen in the novel. Dickens had 
written of an England where, in spite of much crime and 
misery, men ate, drank, and were jolly. He attacked spe- 
cific abuses, "the law's delays" in the Court of Chancery, 
or imprisonment for debt, but he was very far from attack- 
ing the foundations on which society was supposed to rest. 
Dickens' successors were often moved by a more funda- 
mental discontent. Many, no longer sustained by a belief 
in God and immortality, were oppressed by the persistent 
and seemingly useless misery of man. They were inclined 
to ignore those things which redeem man's life from vul- 
garity and insignificance, and, in their desire to tell the 
truth and avoid shams, they often found nothing real 
but selfishness, poverty, brutality, and discontent. Social 
changes and industrial problems enter largely into the 
work of George Bernard Shaw (1856- ), John- 
Galsworthy (1867- ), and George Robert Gis- 
sing (1857-1903). Gissing's early experiences were full 
of suffering and disappointment. He began to be known 



640 THE NEW ERA. 

in the early 80's, and he died worn out at forty-six, after 
a life of struggle, work, and privation. Those social ideas 
and aspirations, which are the most recent outcome of the 
democratic movement, enter largely into the daring and 
brilliant novels of Herbert George Wells (1866- ). 
Like Davidson, Wells is distinctly, almost aggressively, 
modern. Many of the great writers of earlier times grew 
up under the influence of the classics at the public schools 
and at the universities, venerable institutions which re- 
tained something of the traditions of a long past. Wells 
was educated in private schools, and took first class hon- 
ours in zoology in the Royal School of Science. In many 
of his books Wells looks toward the future, and he pictures 
the world as he imagines it will be under the leading of 
science and democracy. 

Among the many recent novelists of distinction we may 
mention Eden Phillpotts (1862- ), Arnold Ben- 
nett (1867- ), and William J. Locke (1863- ). 

The writing of successful plays and a growing popular 
interest in the drama is generally said to be one of the im- 
portant features of recent literary history. Wilde turned 
from poetry to the drama, and produced some plays so 
alive with wit and epigram that they recall the comedies of 
the Restoration. Stephen Phillips won dramatic 
laurels in Paolo and Francesco, (1899), and 
other plays of a poetic and Shakespearean type. Gals- 
worthy and Shaw both began as novelists and then de- 
voted themselves largely to writing for the stage. They 
have won a practical as well as a literary success, and 
have helped to make the drama a living influence on 
contemporary thought. Thus the drama, like poetry, has 
become less conventional, and has been brought again 
into a close relation to modern problems and modern life. 
Henry Arthur Jones (1851- ), who began to write 
toward the end of the last century, and Sir Arthur 



THE "CELTIC REVIVAL." 641 

Wing Pinero (1855- ), the author of The Second 
Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), were leaders in this dramatic 
revival in England, while about the beginning of the pres- 
ent century a remarkable group of dramatists arose in 
Ireland. Promising as this whole movement appears, the 
place that these recent plays will ultimately hold in litera- 
ture is as yet uncertain. The success of many popular 
plays is often as brief as it is brilliant, and it is to be 
remembered that in the Victorian Age certain dramas of 
Bulwer-Lytton and Tom Taylor were probably as dear to 
the theatre-goers of their time as the comedies of Shaw 
to more modern audiences. Few successful acting plays 
have continued to delight successive generations : if they 
survive at all, they survive as literature. 'Many of these 
modern plays, such as those of Shaw, deal with questions 
of the hour. It is for time to determine whether they 
have that quality which will make them live on in litera- 
ture, when the controversies with which they deal have 
become a thing of the past. 

Another important feature of this recent period has 
been the growth of an independent and distinctively 
Th "Cit'c na ti° na l literature in Ireland. In the past, in 
Renais- spite of the great antiquity of Irish civilization, 
sance. ^ na ti nal literature, the myths and legends 

of Ireland had remained almost unknown to their English 
neighbours. Great Irishmen, like Swift, Goldsmith, Burke, 
and Sheridan, had won an honourable place in English liter- 
ature, but as a nation Ireland had remained for centuries 
isolated and apart. The literature and legends of the Irish 
had no such influence on English literature as that exerted 
by the Welsh or the Scotch, and Arthur and Guinevere, 
Bruce and Rob Roy were familiar, where Cuchulain and 
Brian Boru were ignored. In very early times England had 
learned much from Irish teachers, but for a thousand years 
the two countries, though physically near, remained men- 



642 THE NEW ERA. 

tally and spiritually apart. During the middle years of the 
nineteenth century, a new and assertively national spirit 
showed itself in the literature of Ireland. The great 
driving-power back of this literature was a compelling 
patriotism, and a passionate assertion of all things Irish. 
This literary revival, in fact, was at first largely political, 
it was inspired by a national antagonism to England, as 
well as by a love of Ireland, and a devotioD to her legends 
and her past. The mere purely political or aggressively 
patriotic writers were soon followed by Irish scholars, like 
Eugene CTCurrie (1796-1862), Sir Samuel Fergu- 
son (1810-1886), Dr. Patrick Joyce (1827-1914), who 
explored the language and antiquities of Ireland, and 
translated some of the great mass of her early laws and 
literature. These men made the dimly remembered civili- 
zation of ancient Ireland known to scholars, and helped 
to revive poems and legends which even in Ireland had 
been but imperfectly known. Late in the 80s, these 
scholars, antiquarians, and translators were re-enforced by 
still younger writers, who aided by the labours of their 
predecessors,' strove to stimulate and extend the national 
pride in things Irish, and increase the popular interest 
in her native literature. These writers, William But- 
ler Yeats (1865- ), Douglas Hyde (1860- ), 
George W. Russell (" A. E.") (1867- ), and others, 
banded themselves together to work for the common cause. 
They were not strictly the founders of this Irish revival, 
but they so organized and popularized it, that they are 
often spoken of as the beginners of the so-called " Celtic 
Renaissance." Through the labours of this group of writ- 
ers Ireland, in the present and the past, began to take a 
larger and more definite place in the minds of countless 
readers. Some wrote of her history or her literature: some 
re-told her poems and legends in poetry or in prose; some 
wrote novels and short stories of modern Irish life : and still 






YEATS. 643 

others renewed her past and her present in popular 
plays. 

Yeats was the central figure in this Celtic revival. If 
not the greatest genius of the movement, he did the most 
to give it coherence and to insure its success. By nature 
Yeats had much in common with the writers of the roman- 
tic school. He was a lover of beauty, — 

" Whose history began 
Before God made the angelic clan," — 

and he sought to rescue the heroic past of Ireland from 
obscurity and make it a part of our poetic inheritance. He 

began as a poet, publishing his first important 

poem, The Wanderings of Qisin, in 1889, and for 
the next ten years devoted himself almost entirely to narra- 
tive and lyrical verse. Meanwhile the leaders of the Irish 
revival determined to found a native drama, and The Irish 
Literary Theatre was opened in 1899. Yeats' play, The 
Countess Kathleen, was produced in that year, and since 
that time he has given the greater part of his energy to the 
drama. Among these plays, On Bailees Strand, Deirdre, 
and others, are founded on old Irish poems or legends. 
They are full of charm and poetry, and they take us into 
a world remote from the common day. This remoteness, 
this " beauty touched with strangeness/' pervades nearly 
all of Yeats' work. In one of his plays, The Shadowy 
Waters, the hero, Forgael, voyages over unknown seas in 
quest of the eternal dream, preferring the dream to the 
reality. 

" Could we but give us wholly to the dreams, 

And get into their world that to the sense 

Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly 

Among substantial things." 

The essential spirit of Yeats' poetry speaks through these 
words of Forgael's. To Yeats, as to Keats, heard melodies 
were sweet, but those unheard were sweeter. Yet Yeats 



644 THE NEW ERA. 

was no mere dreamer. One of his early plays, Cathleen ni 
Houlihan, symbolizing the claim of Ireland upon the devo- 
tion of her sons, bound him to the people by the fervour 
of a common patriotism. Indeed, by giving up pure poetry 
for drama, Yeats showed his desire to come into more 
direct contact with the life of the people. 

The Celtic Revival passed through various stages, and 
declared itself in many ways. It was political, patriotic, 
antiquarian, and poetic. Yeats' chief work was to revive 
the glories of the past; he gave us Celtic mysticism, but 
not Irish humour. Other writers brought into this rising 
Irish literature a more substantial, broadly human, and 
modern spirit. Plays and stories were written, which 
showed us, not the Ireland of shadowy memories, but a 
living, substantial Ireland whose peasants were flesh and 
blood. This is the Ireland, in its tragedy and its humour, 
that lives in the peasant plays of John Millington 
Synge (1871-1909), perhaps the most original writer 
that the Celtic Revival has so far produced. 

We have spoken briefly of some of the more significant 
features in the literary history of England since the age 
of Tennyson. In so short a survey, many things of impor- 
tance must be omitted, but one feature in the history of this 
period cannot be entirely passed over. We have spoken 
Th E °^ ^ e dreary, sceptical, destructive spirit that 

newai of darkens so much of this recent literature ; we 
Faith. must not fail to notice that there is also a gradual 

renewal of faith, courage, and hope. There were frantic, 
rebellious, self-indulgent, despairing spirits among the 
writers of the closing nineteenth century; there was a hard 
cynical levity in the opening years of the twentieth. But 
if we look closely we shall see the signs of change. About 
the end of the last century, Francis Thompson (1859- 
1907) expressed in highly wrought and intricate verse, a 
deep religious faith and a mystical nearness to the un- 



WAR AND FAITH. 645 

seen. Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874- ), Hillaire 
Belloc (1870- ), Alfred Noyes, and other recent 
writers confirm onr feeling that the frenzied passion and 
quick despair of the late Victorians has been succeeded 
by a deeper and a saner mood. Then came the testing of 
England by the most bloody and critical war in all his- 
tory, and the country of Drake and Nelson, of Milton and 
Wordsworth rose up to meet the test. The trifler, the 
atheist, and the cynic were tried as by fire, and the soul 
of England awoke to a deeper seriousness and a renewed 
courage. Men and women were purified and ennobled by 
patriotism, suffering, and self-sacrifice. Social distinctions 
and outward differences, once thought all-important, were 
forgotten in devotion to a common purpose. Life was 
made new to a generation that lived and fought in the 
shadow of death and only the greatest things seemed worth 
while. Already, we can find in the nation's literature 
some hint of the forces that are at work beneath the surface. 
We find something significant in Noyes' poem " The 
Searchlights " and in the religious exaltation of John 
Oxenham's poems of the war. We find it in the spiritual 
progress of Mr. Britling, in Wells' war-novel Mr. Britling 
Sees it Through. We find the new spirit even more 
distinctly in Donald Hankey's A Student In Arms. We 
cannot measure or define the change that the war is mak- 
ing in English literature, but these words of Noyes will 
help us to imagine what at least one element in that change 
will be : — 

" Thou whose deep ways are in the sea, 
Whose footsteps are not known, 
To-night a world that turned from Thee 
Is waiting — at Thy Throne." 



APPENDIX. 



LIST TO ACCOMPANY MAP SHOWING PRIN- 
CIPAL RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS, ETC. 

Iona: Founded (c. 563) by St. Columba from Ireland. 

Coldingham: Double monastery of men and women (Celtic) founded by 

Ebba, sister of Oswiu of Northumbria, about the middle of the 

seventh century; destroyed by Danes c. 870. 
Lindisfarne: Founded by Aidan, a Celtic monk from Iona, as a mission, 

c. 635. 
Melrose: Founded c. 635 at old Melrose, two and a half miles east 

of present ruins, and burned by Kenneth MacAlpine, 839; first mo- 
nastic home of St. Cuthbert. 
Hexham: Founded by St. Wilfrid (674) and noted for its artistic 

beauty and magnificence. 
■Jarrow: Founded by Benedict Biscop, in 680, seven miles from his 

previous foundation of Wearmouth (674), the two houses, dedicated 

respectively to Peter and Paul, being made into one monastery, the 

home a little later of Bede (673-735). 
Tynemouth: Chapel built (625) by Edwin, king of Northumbria; 

enlarged by Oswald, Edwin's successor; burnt by Danes, 865. 
Whitby: Double monastery founded c. 657 by the Abbess Hilda, a 

pupil of the Celtic Aidan of Lindisfarne; home of Caedmon, 670. 
Ripon: Monastery founded (660) by Abbot Eata of Melrose, a pupil 

of Aidan; afterwards bestowed on St. Wilfrid. 
Lastingham: Founded c. 653 by Cedda (St. Chad), from Lindisfarne. 
York: Church built for King Edwin of Northumbria by Paulinus (627); 

school founded by Egbert, first Archbishop of York (c. 750); Alcuin, 

735-814. 
Lincoln: Church built (c. 628) by Blaecca, a convert of Paulinus. 
Repton: Double monastery founded about 660; destroyed by Danes, 

870. 

• 647 



648 LIST OF PRINCIPAL RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS. 

Crowland: Abbey founded, " according to tradition, by Ethelbald of 

Mercia, c. 716; destroyed by Danes, 870. 
Peterborough: The first Benedictine Abbey in the Fenland, founded 

(c. 655) by Sexulf, a Mercian thegn; -plundered by Danes, 870. 
Ely: Abbey founded by St. Etheldreda (St. Audrey) in 673; destroyed 

by Danes, 870. 
Evesham: Abbey founded 709 and dedicated to the Virgin. 
Abington: Monastery of St. Mary of Abington, founded by Hearn, 

nephew of Cissa, King of Wessex, c. 605 (Benedictine); destroyed by 

Danes, rebuilt 955. 
Malmesbury: Abbey founded by Maelduib, a Scottish missionary and 

scholar, probably about 640. Aldhelm (640-709) studied under 

Maelduib before he entered the school at Canterbury; he returned 

to Malmesbury and became Abbot, 673„ 
Dunvrich: School founded (633) by the Burgundian Felix, Bishop 

of Dunwich, after the model of the Gallic schools, his teachers 

being brought from Kent. 
Barking: Double monastery founded (c. 666) by Earconwald, after- 
wards Bishop of London; burnt by Danes, 870. 
Glastonbury: Abbey here a very early British foundation ; monastery 

endowed by Ine, King of Wessex (d. 766). Archbishop Dunstan 

(924-985) educated here and became Abbot, 943. 
Winchester: Cenwalh, King of Wessex, founded Old Minster of St. 

Peter and St. Paul, c. 648. King Alfred had a school attached 

to his court, and planned a New Minster which was built (903) by 

his son and successor Edward. 
Canterbury: See, with three churches, a monastery and school founded 

by St. Augustine, 597-603. School reorganized and improved by 

Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian, c. 670. Aldhelm studied here 

under Hadrian. 
Athelney: King Alfred, defeated by Danes, took refuge here for a year, 

and founded a monastery and school (c. 879) in remembrance of 

the protection he had received. 
Wimborne: Double monastery and school founded (c. 705) by Cuth< 

burh, sister of King Ine of Wessex. 



Hi 




IS 



1 



4 I 



LIST OF AUTHORS TO ACCOMPANY 
LITERARY MAP OF ENGLAND. 

The following is a list of some of the most representative men in 
English literature. By referring to the accompanying map, the 
student will be able to find their birthplaces as well as some of the 
localities in which they have lived. Where the names of the smaller 
places have been omitted on the map, the county in which they are 
situated can be found from the following list, and their general situation 
on the map approximately determined. 

Addison, Joseph, b. Millston, Wilts, 1. London. 
Alfred, King, b. Wantage, Berks, 1. Winchester, Hants. 
Arthurian Legends, chiefly located in Cornwall. 

Bacon, Francis (Lord St. Albans), b. London, 1. St. Albans, Hertford 

Bede, or Baeda, b. Monkwearmouth, Durham, 1. Jarrow, Northumber- 
land. 

Beaumont, Francis, b. Grace-Dieu, Leicester. 

Blake, William, b. and 1. London. 

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (Lord), b. Battersea, Surrey, 1. London, 

Bronte, Charlotte, Anne, Emily, b. and 1. Haworth, Yorkshire. 

Browne, Sir Thomas, b. London, 1. Norwich, Norfolk. 

Browne, William, b. Tavistock, Devonshire, 1. at Wilton and Dorking 
in Surrey. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, b. Durham, 1. London. 

Browning, Robert, b. and 1. London. 

Bunyan, John, b. Elstow, near Bedford, Bedfordshire. 

Burke, Edmund, b. Dublin, 1. London, etc. 

Butler, Samuel, b. Strensham, Worcester. 

Burns, Robert, b. near Ayr, Ayrshire, Scotland. 

Burton, Robert, b. Lindley, Leicestershire, 1. Oxford. 

Byron, Lord George Gordon, b. London, 1. Newstead Abbey, Notting- 
hamshire. 

Caedmon, b. (?), 1. Whitby, Yorkshire. 
Cambrensis, Geraldus, b. and 1. Pembrokeshire, Wales. 
Carlyle, Thomas, b. Ecclefechan, near Annan, Scotland- 

649 



650 LIST OF AUTHORS. 

Chatterton, Thomas, b. Bristol, Gloucester. 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, b. and 1. London. 

Clough, Arthur Hugh, b. Liverpool, Lancashire. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, b. Ottery St. Mary, Devon, 1. Keswick, 

Cumberland (Lake Country). 
Collins, William, b. Chichester, Sussex. 
Collins, William Wilkie, b. and 1. London. 
Cowley, Abraham, b. and 1. London. 

Cowper, William, b. Great Berkhampstead, Hertford, 1. Olney, Bucks. 
Crabbe, George, b. Aldborough, Suffolk. 
Crashaw, Richard, b. and 1. London. 

Dekker, Thomas, b. and 1. London. 

Defoe, Daniel, b. London, 1. London, Tilbury, etc. 

De Quincey, Thomas, b. near Manchester, 1. Grasmere, Westmoreland 

(Lake Country). 
Dickens, Charles, b. Landport, Hampshire, 1. London. 
Donne ; John, b. and 1. London. 

Drummond, William, b. Hawthornden, near Edinburgh. 
Dunbar, William, b. and 1. East Lothian, Scotland. 
Dryden, John, b. Aid winkle, All Saints, Northampton, 1. London. 

Eliot, George, b. Arbury Hall, Warwickshire, 1. Nuneaton, Coventry, 
London. 

Fielding, Henry, b. Sharpham Park, Somerset. 

Fletcher, John, b. Northampton, 1. Ryeland, Sussex. 

Fuller, Thomas, b. Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, 1. London. 

Gay, John, b. Frithelstock, Devon, 1. Barnstaple, Devon. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, b. Pallas, Ireland, 1. London, etc. 

Gray, Thomas, b. London, 1. Stoke Pogis, Bucks, Cambridge. 

Habington, William, b. Hendlip, near Worcester, Worcestershire. 

Hall, Joseph, b. Bristow Park, Leicestershire. 

Hardy, Thomas, b. Dorsetshire. 

Herbert, George, b. near Montgomery, Wales, 1. Bemerton, near Salis- 
bury, Wiltshire. 

Henryson, Robert, Dunfermline, Scotland. 

Herrick, Robert, b. London, 1. Dean's Prior, Devon. 

Hogg, James, b. Ettrick, Selkirkshire, Scotland. 

Hooker, Richard, b. at or near Exeter, Devon, I. London, Boscombe 
Wilts, Bishopsborne, near Canterbury, Kent. 

Howard, Henry (Earl of Surrey), b. (?) 1. Surrey, Sussex. 



LIST OF AUTHORS. 651 

Johnson, Samuel, b. Lichfield, Stafford, 1. London. 
Jonson, Benjamin, b. and 1. London. 

Keats, John, b. and 1. London. 

Kingsley, Charles, b. Holne Vicarage, Dartmoor, Devon, 1. Eversley, 
Hampshire. 

Lamb, Charles, b. and 1. London. 

Langland, William, b. Cleobury-Mortimer, Shropshire, 1. Malvern Hills 

and London. 
Layamon, b. North Worcestershire, 1. Ernley Regis. 

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, b. Rothley, Leicester, 1. London. 

Malmesbury, William of, b. in Somersetshire, 1. Malmesbury, Wiltshire. 

Map, Walter, b. Wales, 1. Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire. 

Marlowe, Christopher, b. Canterbury, Kent, 1. London. 

Marvell, Andrew, b. Winestead, near Hull, York, 1. London. 

Meredith, George, b. Hampshire, 1. Box Hill, Surrey. 

Milton, John, b. and 1. London, and Horton, Bucks. 

Monmouth. Geoffrey of, b. Monmouthshire, d. Llandaff St. Asaph, 

Wales. 
More, Sir Thomas, b. and 1. London. 
Morris, William, b. Walthamstow, Essex, 1. Kelmscott, Gloucester; 

London. 

Peele, George, b. (?) 1. London. 

Pope, Alexander, b. London, 1. London and Twickenham, Middlesex. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, b. Devon, 1. London. 
Ramsay, Allan, b. Lanarkshire, Scotland, 1. London. 
Richardson, Samuel, b. Derbyshire, 1. London. 
Rolle, Richard, b. Thornton, Yorkshire, 1. Hampole, Yorkshire. 
Rossetti, Christina, b. and 1. London. 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, b. and 1. London. 

Ruskin, John, b. London, 1. London and Oxford and Brantwood, in 
Lake Country. 

Sackville, Thomas (Lord Buckhurst), b. Buckhurst, Sussex, 1. London 
Scott, Sir Walter, b. Edinburgh, 1. Abbotsford, near Melrose. 
Shakespeare, William, b. Stratford-on-Avon, Warwick, 1. London, 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, b. Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex. 
Shorthouse, Joseph Henry, b. and 1. Birmingham, Warwickshire. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, b. Penshurst in Kent. 
Skefton, John, b. Norfolk, 1. Cambridge. 



652 LIST OF AUTHORS. 

Smollett, Tobias George, b. Dumbartonshire, Scotland. 

Southey, Robert, b. Bristol, Gloucester, 1. Keswick, Cumberland 

(Lake Country). 
Steele, Richard, b. Dublin, 1. London. 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, b. Edinburgh, Scotland. 
Suckling, John, b. Twickenham, Middlesex, 1. London. 
Surrey (Earl of), see Howard. 

Swift, Jonathan, b. Dublin, 1. London, Dublin, etc. 
Swinburne, Charles Algernon, b. and 1. London. 

Taylor, Jeremy, b. Cambridge. 

Tennyson, Lord Alfred, b. Somersby, Lincoln, 1. Farringford House, 

Isle of Wight, and Blackdown, in Sussex. 
Thomson, James, b. Ednam, Roxburgh, 1. London. 
Trollope, Anthony, b. London, 1. Ireland, London, etc c 

Vaughan, Henry, b. Brecknockshire, Wales. 

Waller, Edmund, b. Coleshill, near Amersham, Hertford, 1. London. 

Walton, Izaak, b. Stafford, 1. London, d. Winchester. 

Wyclif, John, b. Hipswell (?), near Richmond, York, 1. Oxford. 

Wither, George, b. Brentnorth, Hampshire. 

Wordsworth, William, b. Cockermouth, 1. Grasmere and Rydal Mount 

(Lake Country). 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, b. Allington Castle, Kent. 

Young, Edward, b. Upham, near Winchester, Hampshire, 



p~7 




GENERAL TABLE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 653 




654 GENERAL TABLE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



g£ 



M 
H 

Q ^ 

g 
S 

H 

O 
H 

H 



do 

a 



go 

o 



03 0) 



III 

(3 2 ^ 
41 "ei 
Hill 

Hill 



J 

■g-g 

CO <J 



B -a. 



+* s w a 2 

§ « g 2 -g 



oj a 



3 8 
.B T 

»-N JO 

■si as 

gW S3 
-d < S- E I 



03 *"• rj , ' H w >- Pi 



2 a 

< M 









Pi J 

a ° 

3 



e3 «« »H 

3£o 



e© g 8 




GENERAL TABLE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 655 



o 
I 

Si « 

o 
H 



5 

CO 

«-* W 



W Q 

►3 O 



1-5 w 

«5 H 

o 




3^S 



^ , 2 T3 2 3 fl o ^iS'SoS 

ag*3H«£gg3j 



iH « W -* 10 



a m a 






STUDY LISTS. 



NOTES AND REFERENCES. 

The following list is intended to be a practical working guide for the 
student or the general reader. As a rule, the references are to cheap 
and readily obtainable books, and (except in a few cases) works in 
foreign languages have been excluded, unless they can be had in an 
English translation. It has been found impracticable to include all 
the excellent school or college editions of standard texts. To have 
done this would have involved an unnecessary repetition of titles, and 
extended the list to an unwarrantable length. Many of them, however, 
have been omitted with reluctance. In some cases a method of 
approach to an author has been indicated by enumerating a few of 
his works in the order in which they are to be read. Books especially 
recommended are starred (*); this means that they are considered 
for some reason, indispensable, or particularly desirable; they do not, 
of necessity, possess the greatest intrinsic merit. The following abbre- 
viations are used in the list: E. M. L. = English Men of Letters Series; 
G. W. S. = Great Writers 1 Series; D. N. B. = Dictionary of National 
Biography; E. E. T. S. = Early English Text Society's Publications; 
S. P. C. K. = Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. 



GENERAL REFERENCES. 

I. HISTORY. * Green's History of the English People, 4 vols. 
(Harper); Green's Short History of the English People (Harper); Traill's 
Social England, 6 vols. (Putnam); Gairdner's Students' History of Eng- 
land (Longmans) is convenient and reliable for general reference. 

Economic and Social Conditions. Cheyney's Introduction to the 
Industrial and Social History of England (Macmillan); Gibbins' Indus* 
trial History of England (Methuen). 

II. LITERARY HISTORY. Taine's History of English Literature, 
2 vols. (Holt), brilliant, but not always satisfactory or reliable; 
Jusserand's Literary History of the English People, Vol. I, 1905, Vol. II, 
1907 (Putnam); Chambers' Cyclopaedia of English Literature (new ed., 
1902), 3 vols.; Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols., Stephen and 
Lee (editors), Supplement, etc., 4 vols. (Macmillan); Warton's History 

057 



658 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

of English Poetry, ed. by Hazlitt, 4 vols. (Tegg); Courthope's History 
of English Poetry, 4 vols., 1895-1903 (Macmillan); Howitt's Homes and 
Haunts of the British Poets (Routledge); Hutton's Literary Landmarks 
of London (Harper); * Baedeker's Great Britain; Emerson's History of 
the English Language (Macmillan); Lounsbury's History of the English 
Language (Holt); Parsons' English Versification (Leach); Alden's 
English Verse (Holt). 

III. SELECTIONS. 1. POETRY. Ward's English Poets, 4 vols. 
(Macmillan). * Manly's English Poetry, 1170-1892 (Ginn), an admirable, 
convenient and comprehensive collection, includes many poems not 
readily accessible. The Oxford Book of Verse, 1250-1900 (Clarendon 
Press); Pancoast's Standard English Poems (Holt); Hale's Longer 
English Poems (Macmillan). 2. PROSE, etc. Craik's Selections 
from English Prose, 5 vols. (Macmillan); Pancoast's Standard English 
Prose (Holt); Cassell's Library of English Literature, ed. by H. Morley. 
Morley's English Writers, 11 vols. (Cassell), contains numerous trans- 
lations of Early English and Celtic poems, paraphrases and abstracts 
of various works, etc. The Oxford Treasury of English Literature 
(Clarendon Press) Vol. I. "Old English to Jacobean " (includes poetry 
and prose with historical, critical, and biographical matter) ; Vol. II. 
"The Growth of the Drama" (1907). 

IV. MISCELLANEOUS. * Ryland's Chronological Outlines of Eng- 
lish Literature (Macmillan); Allibone's Dictionary of Authors, 5 vols. 
(Lippincott) ; Phillips' Popular Manual of English Literature (Harper); 
Ploetz's Epitome of Universal History (Houghton). 



PART I. 

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE NORMAN 
CONQUEST. 

(Pages 11-71). 

I. Celtic Literature. — (Page 23.) For specimens of Celtic poetry, 
v. Morley's English Writers, Vols. I-XI, passim. See also "Shorter 
English Poems," in Cassell's Library of English Literature; Joyce's 
Old Celtic Romances (Longmans); Tennyson's "Voyage of Maeldune." 
Aubrey de Vere's poems, "The Children of Lir," "Cuchullin," etc., are 
based on Old Irish poems. * Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of 
the Mabinogion has been published in a cheap form by Dent & Co., 
London, and is also included in Everyman's Library. Skene's Four 
Ancient Books of Wales, 2 vols. (Edmonston and Douglas, Edin- 
burgh), contains poems attributed to the bards of the sixth centun/. 

* Cuchulain of Muirtfiemne; The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of 
Ulster, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory (Murray); 

* Gods and Fighting Men: the story of the Tuatha de Danaan and of 
the Fianna of Ireland, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory 
(Scribner). Irish Literature, ed. by Justin McCarthy, 10 vols. (J. D. 
Morris & Co., Philadelphia), covers the whole field. 

History and Criticism. Hyde's Literary History of Ireland, Library 
of Literary History (Scribner) ; * Matthew Arnold's Celtic Literature 
(Macmillan); H. Morley's "The Celtic Element in English Literature," 
in Clement Marot and Other Essays (Chapman and Hall, London); 
Joyce's Social History of Ancient Ireland (Longmans). 

2. Early English. (Pages 32-57.) (a) Translations; Poetry. 
Beowulf: * C. G. Child, prose (Houghton); Tinker, prose (Newson). 

* Earle, The Deeds of Beowulf (Clarendon Press); Garnett, verse, line- 
for-line translation (Ginn); Hall, rhythmical and alliterative (Heath). 
The Ccedmonian Cycle: B. Thorpe, Metrical Paraphrase (London, 
1832); Bosanquet, Genesis only (London, 1860). Cynewulf: * Christ, 
I. Gollancz, text and translation (Nutt); C. H. Whitman (Ginn); 
Elene, Garnett (Ginn); L. H. Holt, in Yale Studies in English, 1904 
(Holt); Juliana, text and translation in Gollancz's Exeter Book (Kegan 
Paul) . The Phamix: I. Gollancz, text and translation in the Exeter Book 
(Kegan Paul); * Cook, in Cook and Tinker's Select Translations from 
Old English Poetry (Ginn). Guthlac: text and translation in Gollancz's 

659 



660 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Exeter Book (Kegan Paul). Andreas: text and translation in Gollancz's 
Exeter Book (Kegan Paul); R. K. Root, verse translation in Yale 
Studies in English (Holt), Judith: Cook, text and translation (Ginn); 
Garnett, translation (Ginn); Morley's English Writers, Vol. II. 

Other Translations. * Cook and Tinker's Select Translations 
from Old English Poetry (Ginn), a most convenient and useful collection. 
Good examples of Early English poetry are given in Longfellow's Poets 
and Poetry of Europe. * The Seafarer, * The Fortunes of Man, the 
opening of CaBdmon's Creation, etc., will be found in Morley's English 
Writers, Vol. II. See also, Morley's " Illustrations of English Religion," 
in Cassell's Library of English Literature, and Brooke's Early English 
Literature, appendix (Macmillan). 

Prose. (Page 57-71.) Bede: Ecclesiastical History, translated from 
the Latin by J. A. Giles (Bohn's Antiquarian Library). King Alfred: 
Orosius' History, text and translation (Bohn's Antiquarian Library); 
* Boethius, translation by W. J. Sedgefield (Clarendon Press). 

Old English Chronicle. Giles' translation is published with his 
translation of Bede (supra) in Bohn's Antiquarian Library. 

(6) Literary History and Criticism. * Ten Brink's Early English 
Literature (Holt); Brooke's History of Early English Literature (Mac- 
millan) ; Az arias' Development of English Literature, Old English Period 
(Appleton); * Lewis' The Beginnings of English Literature (Ginn); 
Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature (S. P. C. K.). Henry Sweet in his 
Sketch of the History of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, in Hazlitt's ed. of War- 
ton's History of English Poetry (Tegg), gives an excellent account of 
the early literature in a few pages. Cook's Introduction to his edition 
of Cynewulf's Christ (Ginn) contains a valuable account of Cynewulf's 
life and writings'. White's Mlfric, A New Study of his Life and Writings, 
in Yale Studies in English (Holt). 

(c) History. Hodgkins' Political History of England (Longmans); 
Freeman's Old English History (Macmillan) ; * Green's Making of 
England and * Conquest of England (Harper). Grant Allen's Anglo- 
Saxon Britain (S. P. C. K.) is an admirable summary of the entire 
period, including a brief survey of the language and literature. De La 
Saussaye's Religion of the Teutons (Ginn), and Gummere's Germanic 
Origins (Scribner), contain much suggestive and curious information. 
Biographical. William of Malmesbury's account of Aldhelm, and 
Cuthbert's Letter on the Death of Bede, are given in Morley's Library of 
English Literature. Asser's Life of Alfred, Cook's translation (Ginn), or, 
translated by Giles in Six Old English Chronicles (Bohn's Antiquarian 
Library). For Cozdmon see Bede's Ecclesiastical History. 



STUDY LISTS. 661 

FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 

(Pages" 72-103.) 

Anglo-Latin Literature. (Page 75.) * Schofield, English Litera- 
ture from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (Macmillan). This is the 
best general survey of this period in English. Wright, Biographia 
Britannica Literaria, Anglo-Norman Period (London, 1846). Wright, 
Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets and Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century, 
Rolls Series (London, 1872). Wright, The Latin Poems commonly 
attributed to Walter Mapes, text and translation (Camden Society, 
1841). Apocalypse of Golias is given in translation in Cassell's Library, 
Shorter English Poems, ed. by Morley. Giles' Six Old English Chronicles 
(Bohn's Antiquarian Library) includes, in translation, the Latin 
histories of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gildas, Nennius, etc. Translations 
of the Chronicles of Matthew Paris, William of Malmesbury, Henry of 
Huntingdon, etc., and the historical works, etc., of Giraldus Cambrensis, 
will also be found in Bohn's Antiquarian Library. Swan's translation 
of Gesta Romanorum is in the Knickerbocker Nugget Series. A. Jessopp's 
Coming of the Friars (Putnam) and * Ker's The Dark Ages (Periods of 
European Literature) (Scribner) relate to this period. 

Norman-French Literature. (Page 80.) Toynbee's Specimens 
of Old French (ninth to fifteenth centuries) with Introduction, Notes, 
and Glossary (Clarendon Press), is a useful hand-book, and contains 
full bibliographical references, etc. Gaston Paris, La Litterature Fran- 
gaise au Moyen-Age (Hachette, 1905); Gaston Paris, Mediaeval French 
Literature, London, 1903 (Temple Primers); Saintsbury's Short History 
of French Literature (Clarendon Press), or Dowden's History of French 
Literature, Literatures of the World Series (Appleton). The Song of 
Roland has been translated into English prose by Isabel Butler in 
Riverside Literature Series (Houghton) ; A. Lang has translated 
Aucassin and Nicolette (Mosher). See also, for other French Romances, 
"Romance," section 4, below. 

Romance Literature. (Page 81.) As a general guide in this 
field the student should consult: A. H. Billings' Guide to the Middle 
English Metrical Romances (Holt), and the article "Romance" in 
Encyclopaedia Britannica, which gives a bibliography. Ellis, Speci- 
mens of Early English Metrical Romances, ed. by Halliwell, 3 vols. 
(Bohn); Ritson, Ancient English Metrical Romances (London, 1802), 
or, revised by Goldsmid (Edinburgh, 1884). * W. W. Newell, King 
Arthur and the Table Round, 2 vols. (Houghton), includes translations 
from Crestien de Troyes. Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knyght, ed. by 
Morris in E. E. T. S. * The same, "retold in modern prose," by J. L. 
Weston (New Amsterdam Book Co.). J. L. Weston has also published 
versions of the Legend of Sir Launcelot du Lac (1901), the Legend of 



062 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Sir Perceval (1906), and King Arthur and his Knights, 1899 (Scribner). 
Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d' Arthur, Globe Edition (Macmillan); selec- 
tions from Malory, ed. by Mead (Ginn); King Horn, ed. by Hall (Clar- 
endon Press); Havelock the Dane, ed. by Skeat (Clarendon Press); The 
Squyr of Lowe Degre, ed. by Mead (Ginn); Morley's Early English Prose 
Romances, seven specimens (Carisbrooke Library). A number of the 
important works of this period will be included in Heath's Belles- 
Lettres Series and in Ginn's Albion Series. 

Celtic Literature. Thomas Stephens' Literature of the Kymry, tenth 
and twelfth centuries (Longmans); Fletcher, Arthurian Materials in 
the Chronicles, especially of Great Britain and France, Harvard Studies 
and Notes, Boston, 1906; Newell, King Arthur and the Table Round 
(Houghton); Nutt, Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail, Folk-Lore 
Society Publications, 1888; Rhys, Studies in the Arthurian Legend 
(Clarendon Press, 1891); H. Maynadier, The Arthur of the English 
Poets (Houghton); Maccallum, Tennyson's Idylls of the King and 
Arthurian Story from the Sixteenth Century (Macmillan) contains an 
introduction dealing briefly with the earlier stages of the Arthurian 
legend. 

English Literature. (Pages 84-103.) R. Morris, Specimens of 
Early English, Part I, 1150-1300 (Clarendon Press); Layamon's 
Brut, or Chronicle of Britian, ed. by Sir F. Madden, 3 vols., London, 
1847. Morley's English Writers, Vol. Ill, includes extracts from the 
Brut. The Ormulum, ed. by R. Holt, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press). The 
Nun's Rule, or Ancren Riwle (modernised), ed. by Gasquet, is in King's 
Classics (De La More Press); The Owl and the Nightingale is included in 
Morris' Specimens of Early English; a selection from it is given in 
Maury's English Poetry (Ginn), together with selections from King Horn, 
the Ormulum, etc.; Early Popular Poetry of Scotland, ed. by Laing, 
revised edition by Hazlitt, 2 vols., London, 1895. Ballads. F. J. 
Child, The English and Scotch Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (Houghton); 

* English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1 vol., ed. by G. L. Kittredge, 
with an excellent introduction, from Professor Child's great collection; 
Gummere, Old English Ballads, Athenaeum Press Series (Ginn); Kinard, 
Old English Ballads (Silver, Burdett), is a smaller collection, suited to 
less advanced students. 

English History and Literature. Norman Britain, by Rev. W. 
Hunt, in Early Britain Series (S. P. C. K.); Jewett, The Story of 
the Normans (Story of the Nations' Series); Freeman's Norman Con- 
quest, Vol. V, or the one- volume abridgment of it in the Clarendon Press ; 
H. W. C. Davis, England Under Normans and Angevins, being second 
volume of A History of England, ed. by C. W. C. Oman (Putnam); Hall, 
Court Life Under the Plantagenets (Henry II) (Macmillan); Barnard, 
Companion to English History, — Middle Ages — (Clarendon Press); 

* Ker, Epic and Romance (Macmillan); Saintsbury, The Flourishing 



STUDY LISTS. 663 

of Romance and the Rise of Allegory, in " Periods of European Literature " 
(Scribner); J. W. Hales, Folia Literaria (Macmillan), includes essays 
on "Old English Metrical Romances," "The Lay of Havelock the 
Dane," etc. ; Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time, 2 vols. (Mac- 
millan); Carlyle's Past and Present gives a good picture of a mediaeval 
monastery; Gross, The Sources and Literature of English History 
(Longmans). 

The Age of Chaucer. 

(Pages 104-153.) 

The Age of Chaucer. History, Manners, etc. Pauli, Pictures 
of Old England (Macmillan) ; Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in 
the Middle Ages, fourteenth century (Putnam); Wright, History of 
Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages 
(Triibner, 1871) ; Cutt, Scenes and Characters in the Middle Ages 
(Virtue & Co., London, 1872); Brown, Chaucer's England (Hunt 
and Blackett, London, 1869); Jessopp, Coming of the Friars and Other 
Essays (Putnam); Schofield, English Literature from the Norman 
Conquest to Chaucer (Macmillan); Snell, The Fourteenth Century (Periods 
of European Literature, Scribner); Snell, The Age of Chaucer (Bell). 



Literature in the Fourteenth Century. 

(Pages 112-125) 

Cursor Mundi (Page 112) has been edited in seven parts by R. 
Morris in E. E. T. S. * Selections, which give a fair general notion 
of the poem, are given in Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English, 
Vol. II (Clarendon Press), and in Manly 's English Poetry (Ginn). 

Richard Rolle, etc. (Page 113.) Richard Rolle of Hampole 
and his Followers, ed. by Horstman, 2 vols., in " Yorkshire Writers " 
(Sonnenschein); English Prose Treatises of, ed. by Perry in E. E. T. S. 
The Prick of Conscience, ed. by R. Morris for " The Philosophical 
Society," 1863. * Selections from the Prick of Conscience in Morris 
and Skeat 's Specimens of Early English, Vol. II (Clarendon Press). This 
volume of Morris and Skeat's Specimens also contains some poems of 
Lawrence Minot, sundry lyrics, including "Alysoun," and will be found 
generally useful for this period. Minot' s Poems, ed. by Hall, are 
published by the Clarendon Press. 

Romance. (Page 116.) Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight, ed. 
by R. Morris in E. E. T. S. * A convenient English prose translation 
has been made by J. L. Weston (Nutt). The Pearl (Page 118) has 
been edited by Gollancz (Nutt), by R. Morris in E. E. T. S., and by 
Osgood in Belles-Lettres Series (Heath). Selections from The Pearl 
are given in Manly 's EnglishJPoetry, and translations into modern 



664 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

English verse have been made by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell (Century Co., 
1896) and G. G. Coulton (Nutt, 1906). 

John Gower. (Page 120.) Confessio Amantis, ed. by Macaulay, 
selections (Clarendon Press). Confessio Amantis in Morley's "Caris- 
brooke Library." A few selections are given in Ellis' Specimens of the 
Early English Poets (Washbourne, London, 1845). There is a very 
severe indictment of Gower 's poetry in Lowell's My Study Windows, 
art. "Chaucer " (Houghton). 

John Wyclif. (Page 122.) Select English Works, ed. by T. Arnold, 
3 vols. (Clarendon Press). Selections from Wyclif 's Bible are given in 
Wycliffe's Bible (Clarendon Press) Maynard, Merrill & Co.'s "English 
Classics," No. 107; and Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English, 
Vol. II. Brief selections from Wyclif s English Works (modernised) are 
given in the University of Pennsylvania's Transactions and Reprints, 
II, 5. For Biography and Criticism, v. The Age of Wyclif, by G. M. 
Trevelyan (Longmans); John Wyclif by Lewis Sergeant (Heroes of 
the Nation Series); John Wyclif, his Life, Times, and Teaching, by 
Rev. A. R. Pennington (S. P. C. K.). 

Mandeville. (Page 124.) The Travels of Sir John Mandeville 
(Macmillan); The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, ed. by 
Morley (Cassell's National Library); art. on Mandeville in D. N. B. 

Langland. (Page 125.) Works. The Vision of William concerning 
Piers the Plowman (three texts) ed. by Skeat, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press); 
William Langland' s Piers the Plowman (school edition) ed. by Skeat 
(Clarendon Press); * Langland's Vision of Piers the Ploughman, done 
into modern prose with an introduction by Kate M. Warner (Macmillan). 

Biography and Criticism. Jusserand's Piers Ploughman, a contribu- 
tion to the history of English mysticism (Putnam); and for briefer treat- 
ment, his Literary History of the English People, Vol. I, Chap. IV. 

Chaucer. (Page 132.) Works. Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by 
Skeat, 6 vols. (Clarendon Press). This is the standard edition, valuable 
for advanced work. * The Globe Chaucer, ed. by Pollard (Macmillan), 
or The Students' ChaUcer, ed. by Skeat (Clarendon Press), are good 
editions, sufficient for all ordinary purposes. Editions of Various 
Poems. The Prologue, The Knight's Tale, and others of the Canterbury 
Tales, have been edited in a convenient form by Morris and Skeat 
(Clarendon Press), and by Liddell (Macmillan). 

Biography, Criticism, etc. * A. W. Ward's Chaucer, E. M. L. ; 
* Root's The Poetry of Chaucer (Houghton); or Pollard's Chaucer, in 
English Literature Primers (Macmillan), are excellent guides. Louns- 
bury, Studies in Chaucer, 3 vols. (Harper); Ten Brink, The Language 
and Metre of Chaucer, translated by Smith (Macmillan); Hempl, 
Chaucer's Pronunciation (Heath); * Lowell's essay on "Chaucer" in 
My Study Windows (Houghton); Hazlitt's lecture on "Chaucer and 
Spenser " in Lectures on the English Poets (Bohn); Snell's Age of Chaucer 



STUDY LISTS. 665 

(Bell) ; Ten Brink's account of Chaucer in his English Literature, Vol. II. 
(Holt). Saunders, Canterbury Tales (Macmillan), contains illustrations 
reproduced from the Ellesmere manuscript. See also, Palgrave's poem 
"The Pilgrim and the Ploughman," in his Visions of England (Cassell). 
Suggestions for Reading. " The Prologue," " Knight's Tale," 
" Clerk's Tale," " Man of Lawe's Tale," " Nonne Preste's Tale," " The 
Pardoner's Tale," Chaucer's " Tale of Sir Thopas," " The Prioresses 
Tale," " Ballad of Good Counseil," " Compleint to his Empty Purse," 
will serve as an introduction to a more extended knowledge of 
Chaucer's Works. 



PART II, 

1400-1860. 

THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE. 

Chaucerian School, etc. 

(Pages 155-170.) 

English Chaucerians. (Pages 155-159.) Selections from Occleve 
Lydgate, Skelton, or from some other writers of this period, will be 
found in Southey's British Poets, Chaucer to Jonson (Longmans); Fitz- 
gibbon's Early English Poetry, in Canterbury Poets' Series (Walter 
Scott); Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 1394-1579 (Clarendon 
Press, 1871); Ward's English Poets; Manly's English Poetry, etc. 

Scottish Poets. (Pages 159-164).) Barbour's Bruce has been 
ed. by Skeat (E. E. T. S.). R. Henry son, Fables, ed. by Laing (Edin- 
burgh, 1865). The Testament of Cresseid is included in Skeat's Chau- 
cerian and other Pieces (Clarendon Press); King James I of Scotland, 
Poems ed. by Eyre-Todd in the " Abbot sford Series of Scottish Poetry " 
(Glasgow); Henryson, Dunbar, and G. Douglas, also appear in this 
series. See also, Dunbar, ed. by Arber, in "Selections from the British 
Poets" (Macmillan). The standard edition of Dunbar, including 
notes and memoir, is that of David Laing, 2 vols. (Edinburgh. 1834), 
Henderson's Scottish Vernacular Literature (Nutt), and J. H. Millars 
Literary History of Scotland (Scribner), may be consulted with advan- 
tage for this period. 

Ballads. See page 6, Study List, under English Literature. 

Fifteenth Century Prose. (Page 168.) Sir Thomas Malory, Le 
Morte d' Arthur, 3 vols. (Nutt); a reproduction of the original edition, 
ed. with introduction and glossary by H. Oscar Sommer, and an essay 
on Malorv's prose style by Andrew Lang. * Morte d' Arthur, Globe 
Edition (Macmillan); Selections, W. E. Mead (Ginn). 

Beginning of the Renaissance. 

(Pages 171-181.) 

The Renaissance. History and Criticism. Symonds' Renais- 
sance in Italy, 7 vols. (Holt); Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Period 
of the Renaissance in Italy, 2 vols. (Kegan Paul). L. F. Field's Introduc- 

666 



STUDY LISTS. 667 

tion to the Study of the Renaissance (Scribner) is a short and convenient 
survey of the whole subject. * Symonds' art. "Renaissance," in the 
Encyclopaedia Britannica (ninth ed.); Einstein, The Italian Renaissance 
in England (Macmillan); Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century 
(Bell); Moberly, The Early Tudors, in "Epochs of Modern History" 
(Scribner); Powers, England and the Reformation (Scribner); Froude, 
History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, 12 
vols. (Scribner). 

Renaissance in England, 1400-1509. (Page 175.) Caxton: Blades, 
The Biography and Typography of W. Caxton (Trubner); Golden Legend, 
7 vols, in "Temple Classics" (Macmillan). 

The Oxford Reformers. (Pages 177-179.) * Seebohm, Oxford 
Reformers (Longmans) is the best general book on this group. Erasmus, 
Concerning the Aim and Method of Education, ed. by Woodward (Mac- 
millan); Select Colloquies, ed. by Whitcomb (Longmans.); transla- 
tions of The Praise of Folly and of the Colloquies are published by 
Reeves and Turner, London; Desiderius Erasmus by E. Emerton 
(Putnam); Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus (Scribner); the two 
books last named contain many translations. Colet: Knight, Life of 
Dean Colet (Clarendon Press); More: Utopia, ed. by Collins (Clarendon 
Press) ; Utopia, " Temple Classics " (Macmillan) ; History of King Richard 
III, ed. by Lumby, Pitt Press Series (Putnam). Roper's Life of 
More is included in an edition of the " Utopia," published by Burt in 
Home Library. * See also for an admirable brief treatment, W. H. 
Shaw's Lectures on the Oxford Reformers, Colet, Erasmus, and More, 
Am. Soc. for Extension of University Teaching, Philadelphia. 

The New Learning in Literature 

(Pages 182-190.) 

Wyatt and Surrey. (Page 183.) Wyatt, Poems (Aldine Edi- 
tion); Surrey, Poems (Aldine Edition); Tottel's Miscellany, containing 
the "Songes and Sonettes," of Surrey, Wyatt, and "uncertain 
authors," is in Arber's "English Reprints." 

Sackville. (Page 184.) Gorboduc is given in Manly's Specimens 
of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, 2 vols. (Athenaeum Press Series, 
Ginn). The Mirror for Magistrates. Sackville's Induction and Complaint 
of Henry Duke of Buckingham are given in Southey's Early British 
Poets; the Induction is in Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 
1394-1579; (Clarendon Press); Works, with memoir, etc., in "Library 
of Old Authors" (London, 1859). 

Gascoigne. (Page 186.) Works, ed. by Hazlitt, 2 vols., Rox- 
burghe Library (London, 1869), The Steel Glass is in Arber's Reprints, 
in Southey's Early British Poets, and is published in an inexpensive 
form by Macmillan; Life and Writings, by F. E. Schelling (Ginn). 



668 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Ascham, (Page 188.) Complete Works, ed. by Giles (London, 
1884). Toxophilus and the Scholemaster are in Arber's Reprints. 

Latimer. (Page 188.) Seven Sermons, before Edward VI, and the 
famous sermon on The Ploughers, are published in a cheap form by 
Macmillan. 

Culmination of the Renaissance. 

(Pages 191-256.) 

Elizabethan England. Creighton, The Age of Elizabeth (Long- 
mans); Goadby's The England of Shakespeare (Cassell); Ordish, Early 
London Theatres and Shakespeare's London (Macmillan); * Stevenson, 
Shakespeare's London (Holt); Warner, The People for whom Shakes- 
peare Wrote (Harper) ; Rye, England as seen by Foreigners in the Days 
of Elizabeth and James I (Jno. Russell Smith, 1865); Seccomb and 
Allen, The Age of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Macmillan); Harrison's Eliza- 
bethan England, Camelot Series. 

Spenser. (Page 202.) Works (Globe Edition, Macmillan); 
* Faerie Queene, ed. by Kitchen, Bks. I-II (Clarendon Press); Shep- 
heard's Calendar, ed. by Herford (Macmillan). 

Biography and Criticism. * Church, Life of Spenser (E. M. L.); 
Craik, Spenser and His Poetry, 3 vols. (Griffin); Warton, Observations 
on the Faerie Queene (London, 1782); * Lowell, Essay on "Spenser," 
in Among My Books (Houghton); Dowden, essays on "Spenser the 
Poet and Teacher 5 " and "The Heroines of Spenser," in Transcripts 
and Studies (Scribner); Landor's "Essay on Spenser," in Imaginary 
Conversations (given also in Pancoast's Standard English Prose). For 
a comparison of Chaucer and Spenser, see Hazlitt's Lectures on the 
English Poets (Bohn) ; Outline Guide to the Study of Spenser (Univ. 
of Chicago, 1894). See also portions relating to Spenser in Courthope's 
English Poetry and Jusserand's Literary History of the English People. 



The English Drama. 

(Page 211.) 

Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes, etc. (Page 214.) 
Pollard, English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes, gives speci- 
mens, with general introduction (Clarendon Press); Manly, Specimens 
of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, 2 vols. (Ginn) ; English Plays in Cassell's 
Library of English Literature, Vol. Ill, ed. by Morley; The York 
Mysteries, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Clarendon Press); Gayley, 
Representative English Comedies (Macmillan). 

History. A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature to 
the Reign of Queen Anne, 3 vols. (Macmillan); Chambers, The Mediaeval 



STUDY LISTS. 669 

Stage, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press); Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of 
the English Drama, 1559-1642, 2 vols. (London, 1871); Hazlitt, Lectures 
on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (London, 1869); 
* Bates, The English Religious Drama (Macmillan); * Symonds, Shakes- 
peare's Predecessors in the English Drama (Macmillan); Lowell, The Old 
English Dramatists (Houghton); Schelling, The English Chronicle 
Play (Macmillan); * Boas, Shakespeare and his Predecessors in the 
English Drama (Scribner) ; Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, 2 vols. 
(Houghton). 

Shakespeare's Predecessors. (Page 222.) Manly, Specimens 
of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama (Ginn) ; * Thayer's Six Best English 
Plays (Ginn); Keltie, The Works of the British Dramatists (Edinburgh, 
1872) ; * Lamb, Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets (Macmillan) ; 
Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (Macmillan) ; 
Simpson, Scenes from Old Play Books (Clarendon Press). 

(a) Greene. The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, ed. by J. C. 
Collins, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press); Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Greene's 
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. by Ward (Clarendon Press); Poems 
of Greene, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson (Bohn). 

(b) Peele. Works, ed. by A. H. Bullen, 2 vols. (Scribner). 

(c) Kyd. Works, ed. by Boas (Clarendon Press) ; Spanish Tragedy, 
"Temple Dramatists" (Macmillan). 

(d) Lyly. Works, ed. by Bond, 3 vols. (Clarendon Press) ; Endymion, 
ed. by Baker (Holt); Euphues, in Arber's Reprints; C. G. Child, John 
Lyly and Euphuism, Erlangen, 1894. 

(e) Marlowe. (Page 224.) Works, ed. by A. H. Bullen (Scribner); 
Best Plays, ed. by H. Ellis (Scribner); Dr. Faustus, with introduction 
and notes, "Temple Dramatists" (Macmillan); Edward II, with 
selections from Tamburlaine (Holt); For Criticism, see Dowden's essay 
on "Christopher Marlowe," in Transcripts and Studies (Scribner); 
" Marlowe," in Henry Kingsley's Fireside Studies (Chatto) ; A. W. Verity, 
Marlowe's Influence on Shakespeare (Macmillan and Bowes); Symonds, 
in Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama (Scribner). 

Shakespeare. (Page 229.) (a) Works. * Furness* Variorum 
Edition (Lippincott). This invaluable edition includes at present 
(1907) about one half of the plays. An extraordinary amount of 
material, carefully and skilfully selected, is brought together for the 
benefit of the student; in addition to the textual criticisms, there are 
general criticisms, both English and foreign. Globe Edition, ed. by 
Clark and Wright (Macmillan) ; Cambridge Edition, ed. by Wright, 9 
vols. (Macmillan). There are many admirable editions of Shakespeare 
adapted for school use. Among these may be mentioned those of Rolfe 
(American Book Co.); Hudson (Ginn); Verity, "Pitt Press" (Putnam); 
The Temple Shakespeare (Dent), and the select plays ed. by W. G. 
Clark and W. Aldis Wright (Clarendon Press). 



670 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

(jb) Grammars, Lexicons, etc. Abbot's Shakespearean Grammar 
(Macmillan) ; Craik's English of Shakespeare (Ginn); Schmidt's 
Shakespeare-Lexicon; Nares, A Glossary of Words, etc., in the Works of 
English Authors, particularly of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries 
(London, 1888); Bartlett, Shakespeare Concordance (Macmillan); 
Mary Cowden Clark, Complete Concordance to Shakespeare (London, 
1864); Furness' Concordance to Shakespeare's Poems (Lippincott) ; 
Skeat, Shakespeare's Plays Illustrated by Selections from North's Plu- 
tarch (Macmillan) ; * Dowden, Shakespeare Primer (American Book 
Co.); Lounsbury, The Text of Shakespeare (Scribner). See also the 
publications of the Shakespeare Society (43 vols.) and of The New 
Shakespeare Society (8 series). 

(c) Biography. * S. Lee, Life of Shakespeare (Macmillan) ; Elze, 
Life of Shakespeare (Bohn); Halliwell-Phillips, Outlines of the Life of 
Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Longmans); Fleay, Chronicle History of the Life 
and Work of Shakespeare (Nimmo); Bagehot, "Shakespeare the Man/' 
in Literary Studies (Longmans); Goldwin Smith, Shakespeare the Man 
(Doubleday). 

(d) Criticism. * Brandes, William Shakespeare a critical study 
in translation (Macmillan) ; * Dowden, Shakespeare: His Mind and 
Art (Harper); an admirable and inspiring introduction to the study 
of Shakespeare. Coleridge, Notes and Lectures on the Plays of Shakes- 
peare (Bohn); * Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (Macmillan); Jame- 
son, Shakespeare's Heroines (Bohn); R. W. Emerson, "Shakespeare 
the Poet," in Representative Men; Carlyle, lecture on "The Hero as 
Poet," in Heroes and Hero-Worship; Eighteenth Century Essays on 
Shakespeare, ed. ,by Smith (Macmillan) ; Ulrici, Shakespeare's Dramatic 
Art, 2 vols. (Bohn); Ten Brink, Five Lectures on Shakespeare (Holt); 
Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (Clarendon Press) ; Gervinus, 
Shakespeare Commentaries (Scribner) ; * Lowell, " Shakespeare Once 
More," in Among My Books (Houghton); * Wendell, William Shakes- 
peare, A Study in Elizabethan Literature (Scribner). Bayne's article 
on "Shakespeare," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition, is valu- 
able for the study of early environment. See also, for social conditions, 
etc., in Shakespeare's time, references on p. 12, Study List, under 
Elizabethan England. 

Elizabethan Prose. 

Hooker. (Page 247.) Works, with Walton's "Life," ed. by Keble 
and revised by Church and Paget, 3 vols. (Clarendon Press) ; * Eccle- 
siastical Polity, Bks. I-I V. (Morley's Universal Library) ; * Dowden's 
essay on "Richard Hooker," in Puritan and Anglican (Holt); * Wal- 
ton's "Life of Hooker," in Walton's Lives. 

Bacon. (Page 250.) Works. Among the numerous cheap 
and convenient editions of the Essays, Reynolds' edition (Clarendon 
Press), Abbot's edition (Longmans), and W. A. Wright's edition (Mac- 



STUDY LISTS. 671 

millan) may be mentioned. Advancement of Learning, ed. by Wright 
(Clarendon Press). Bonn's Library includes the important works 
of Bacon. 

Biography and Criticism. * Church's Life, in E. M. L. Spedding's 
Letters and Life of Lord Bacon, 7 vols. (London, 1862-1874), is the 
standard biography. * Macaulay, essay on "Bacon/* in Essays, 

The Decline of the Renaissance. 

(Page 257-304.) 

Later Elizabethan Literature. 
The Drama. (Page 261.) 

Ben Jonson. (Page 264.) (a) Works, ed. by Cunningham, 3 vols. 
(Scribner); Best Plays, ed. by Nicholson, 3 vols, in Mermaid Series, 
(Scribner). Critical editions of the following plays have appeared in 
the Yale Studies in English (Holt): The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair t 
Poetaster, The Staple of News, The Devil is an Ass, Epiccene, or the 
Silent Woman. The Alchemist is in the "Temple Dramatists," and 
Every Man in his Humour is published in convenient form by Mac- 
millan and by Longmans. Discoveries, ed. by Schelling (Ginn) ; East' 
ward Ho and the Alchemist, edited by Schelling (Heath); Dramatic 
Works and Lyrics, ed. by Symonds, "Canterbury Poets." 

(b) Biography and Criticism. A. J. Symonds, Life of Ben Jonson, 
in "English Worthies " (Appleton); Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson 
(Scribner); Penniman, The War of the Theatres (Ginn). 

Beaumont and Fletcher. (Page 266.) (a) Works. Dramas, ed. 
by Dyce, 11 vols. (London, 1846); The Best Plays, ed. by Strachey, in 
Mermaid Series (Scribner); Philaster, The Faithful Shepherdess, The 
Knight of the Burning Pestle, are in "The Temple Dramatists." 

(6) Biography and Criticism. G. C Macaulay, Francis Beaumont: 
a Critical Study (Kegan Paul); Beaumont and Fletcher and their Con- 
temporaries in Edinburgh Review , April, 1841. 

The Poets op the Early Seventeenth Century. 

(1599 to 1660.) 

Giles and Phineas Fletcher. (Page 268.) Giles Fletcher, Christ's 
Victory and Triumph (Dutton), also given in Southey's Early British 
Poets; Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island, in Southey's Early British 
Poets. 

William Browne. (Page 270.) Britannia's Pastorals, in Southey's 
Early British Poets; Selections in Manly's English Poetry and in Ward's 
English Poets. 



672 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Donne. (Page 270.) Poems, ed. by E. K. Chambers, 2 vols. 
(Scribner). Gosse, Life and Letters, 2 vols. (Dodd), is the standard 
modern biography. Walton's "Life of Donne," in Lives, is a classic, 
but deals chiefly with one side of Donne's character. 

Cowley. (Page 272.) Works, ed. by Grosart, in "Chertsey 
Worthies Library;" * Essays, Bayard Series (Scribner); * Life, in S. 
Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Gosse's essay on "Abraham Cowley," 
in Seventeenth Century Studies (Dodd). 

Herbert. (Page 273.) Poems, in Aldine Poets (Macmillan); 

The English Works of George Herbert, newly arranged and annotated 
and considered in relation to his life, by G. H. Palmer (Houghton); 
Dowden, on Herbert and Vaughan, in Puritan and Anglican (Holt). 

Crashaw. (Page 273.) Poems, ed. by A. R. Waller (Putnam); 

Gosse's essay on "Richard Crashaw," in Seventeenth Century Studies 
(Dodd), and Dowden's criticism of, in Puritan and Anglican (Holt). 

Vaughan. (Page 273.) Poetical Works (Macmillan); Silex 
Scintillans, in "Temple Classics" (Macmillan); L. I. Guiney, article on 
"Henry Vaughan, the Silurist," in the Atlantic Monthly, May, 1894, 
and Dowden in Puritan and Anglican. See also selections from 
Vaughan, Herbert etc., in Pancoast's Standard English Poems (Holt), 
and notes. 

The Cavalier Lyrists. (Page 275.) The Minor Poets of the 
Caroline Period, ed. by Saintsbury (Clarendon Press); Cavalier Poets 
(Maynard, Merrill); A Book of Seventeenth Century Lyrics, ed. by 
Schelling (Ginn). 

Herrick. (Page 275.) Works, ed. by Pollard, 2 vols. (Scribner); 
Poems, 2 vols., in "Temple Classics" (Macmillan); Chrysomela (Mac- 
millan); Selections from Hesperides and Noble Numbers, ed. with intro- 
duction by T. B. Aldrich, in "Century Classics" (Century). Gosse, 
essay on Herrick, in Seventeenth Century Studies (Dodd). 

Milton. (Page 278.) (a) Works. Poetical Works, ed. by Masson, 
3 vols. (Macmillan), is the standard edition. Poetical Works, Globe 
Edition (Macmillan). The Cambridge Milton for Schools, ed. by A. W. 
Verity (Putnam), containing nearly all of Milton's English poems, is 
published in ten small volumes, sold separately. There are numerous 
editions of Milton's selected poems, Comus, Lycidas, etc., adapted for 
school use. Prose Works, ed. by J. A. St. John, 5 vols. (Macmillan); 
Selected Prose Writings (Appleton)j Areopagitica, ed. by Cotterill 
(Macmillan). 

(b) Biography. The standard work on Milton is Masson's Life of 
Milton, in connection with the History of his Time, 6 vols. (Macmillan) j 
Pattison, Milton, in E. M. L.j Garnett, Milton, in G. W. S. 



STUDY LISTS. 673 

(c) Criticism. * Raleigh's Milton (Putnam) and Trent's Milton 
(Macmillan) are excellent critical studies; Macaulay,"Milton"(in Essays, 
Vol. I); De Quincey, "On Milton" (in Works, Masson's ed. Vol. X); 
Lowell, "Milton" (in Among My Books, Vol. II); Maurice, " Milton" (in 
The Friendship of Books andOther Essays, Macmillan) ; * Arnold, " Milton'' 
(in Essays in Criticism, 2d series, Macmillan); Bagehot, in Literary 
Studies, Vol. I (Longmans); * S. Brooke, Milton, in Students' Literary 
Series (Appleton); Dowden, "The Idealism of Milton," in Transcripts 
and Studies (Scribner) ; Addison, Criticisms on Paradise Lost (from The 
Spectator) ed. by Cook (Ginn). 



Seventeenth Century Prose. 

(Page 289.) 

Raleigh. Poems, with Sir Henry Wotton's (Macmillan); Selec- 
tions from prose in Saintsbury's Specimens of English Prose Style 
(Kegan Paul) and Pancoast's Standard English Prose (Holt); Gosse, 
Life of (Appleton). 

Jeremy Taylor. (Page 290.) * Holy Living and Dying, in Bonn's 
Library and " Temple Classics." 

Burton. (Page 291.) Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 vols. (Bohn); Life, 
in Woods' Athence Oxonienses. 

Sir T. Browne. Works, 3 vols. (Bohn); Religio Medici and Urn 
Burial in "Temple Classics;" Hydriotaphia and the Garden of 
Cyrus (Macmillan); Selections in Pancoast's Standard English Prose 
(Holt); L. Stephen, essay on, in Hours in a Library (2d series). 

Fuller. (Page 293.) Church History of Great Britain, ed. by J. 
S. Brewer, 6 vols. (Clarendon Press); Holy and Profane States; The 
Author and His Writings (Sonnenschein); Wise Words and Quaint 
Counsels of Thomas Fuller, selected by Jessop (Clarendon Press); 
Coleridge on Fuller in Literary Remains. 

Clarendon. (Page 293.) Characters and episodes of the great rebellion 
(Selections), ed. by Boyle (Clarendon Press). 

Walton. (Page 294.) The Complete Angler in Bohn's Library, 
"Temple Classics," and in Everyman's Library (with introduction 
by A. Lang); Lives, of Donne, Hooker, etc., in Bohn's Library and 
"Temple Classics;" Lowell, essay on "Walton," in Latest Literary 
Essays (Houghton). 

Bunyan. (Pages 295-304.) (a) Works. Pilgrim's Progress and 
Grace Abounding, ed. by Venables and Peacock (Clarendon Press). 
The Pilgrim's Progress may also be had in the " Temple Classics " and 



674 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

in Everyman's Library. The Holy War and the Heavenly Footman. 
ed. by Peacock (Clarendon Press) and in " Temple Classics ;" Life and 
Death of Mr. Badman and The Holy War (Putnam). 

(b) Biography. Froude, Life, in E. M. L.; Brown, John Bunyan, 
his Life, Times, and Works (Houghton); * Macaulay's life of Bunyan 
in Encyclopaedia Britannica (also included in his Essays); W. H. White, 
John Bunyan, in " Literary Lives" (Scribner). 

(c) Criticism. * Macaulay, essay on Southey's edition of the 
Pilgrim's Progress, in Essays; * Do wden, "Bunyan, " in Puritan and 
Anglican (Holt); Foster, Bunyan' s Country; Studies in the Bedfordshire 
Topography of the Pilgrim's Progress (Virtue & Co.); Royce, "The 
Case of John Bunyan," in Studies of Good and Evil (Appleton). See 
also, B. Wendell, The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English 
Literature (Scribner). 



PART III. 
THE FRENCH INFLUENCE. 

(Pages 305-321.) 

The England of the Restoration. 

History and Criticism. Macaulay, History of England, Vol. I, 
Chap. III. Beljame, Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au 
XVIII Siecle (1660-1744), Paris, 1881 (Hachette); Garnett, The Age 
of Dry den (Macmillan). 

John Dryden. (Page 312.) Works, ed. by Walter Scott, and 
revised by G. Saintsbury, 18 vols. (Putnam); Poetical Works, ed. by 
W. D. Christie (Globe Edition); Select Poems, ed. by W. D. Christie 
(Clarendon Press); Essays, ed. by W. P. Ker, 2 vols. (Clarendon 
Press); An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, ed. by T. Arnold (Clarendon 
Press); Select Satires, ed. by Collins (Macmillan); Selections from the 
Essays and Religio Laici are to be found in Cassell's National 
Library; Essays on the Drama, ed. by W. Strunk, Jr. (Holt). 

Biography. G. Saintsbury, Life of Dryden (E. M. L.); W. Scott, 
"Life," in Saintsbury's edition of the Works. 

Criticism. W. Hazlitt, "On Dryden and Pope," in Lectures on the 
English Poets (Bohn); Macaulay, "Dryden," in Essays, Vol. I; Lowell, 
"Dryden," in Among My Books; M. Sherwood, Dryden' s Dramatic 
Theory and Practice, Yale Studies in English, No. 4 (Holt). 

Suggested Readings. " Absalom and Achitophel," Parti; " Mac- 
Flecknoe," " Under Mr. Milton's Picture," " Ode to the Memory of 
Mistress Ann Killigrew," "Alexander's Feast," "VeniCreatorSpiritus," 
" Song for Saint Cecelia's Day/ ' It will be found interesting and profit- 
able to compare Dryden's modernised version of Chaucer's "Knight's 
Tale (Palamon and Arcite)," with the original, and analyse the respec- 
tive merits of the two poetic styles. Prose. " Essay of Dramatic 
Poesy," or selections in Strunk's " Dryden " or in Pancoast's " Standard 
English Prose." 

Other Restoration Writers. 

The Drama. (Page 319.) 

(a) Thomas Otway. Works, ed. by Thornton (with biography), 3 
vols., London, 1813; Best Plays, ed. by R. Noel (Mermaid Series); 
Venice Preserved and Return from Parnassus ("Temple Classics"). 

Criticism. Gosse, "Otway," in Seventeenth Century Studies (Dodd). 

675 



676 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

(b) William Wycherley. (Page 321.) Complete Plays, ed. by W. C. 
Ward (Mermaid Series). 

(c) William Congreve. (Page 321.) Complete Plays, ed. by A. C. 
Ewald (Mermaid Series). 

Biography. Gosse, Life of William Congreve (G.W. S.). 

Criticism. Macaulay, " Comic Dramatists of the Restoration," in 
Essays, Vol. IV; Lamb, "On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Cen- 
tury," in Essays of Elia. 

John Locke. (Page 321.) Philosophical Works, 2 vols. (Bohn); 
Some Thoughts concerning Education, ed. by R. H. Quick (Pitt Press 
Series); An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. by A. C. 
Fraser, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press). 

Biography. T. Fowler, Locke (E. M.L.). 

Criticism. Fraser, John Locke as a Factor in Modem Thought 
(Clarendon Press). 



The Age of Pope. 

(Pages 322-392.) 

History and Criticism. * L. Stephen, History of English Thought 
in the Eighteenth Century, Chap. XII (Putnam); Beljame, Le Public et 
les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au XVIII e Siecle (Hachette); Perry, 
English Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Harper); Gosse, History 
of English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Macmillan); W. J. 
Courthope, " Conservatism of the Eighteenth Century," in The Liberal 
Movement in English Literature (Murray); O. Elton, The Augustan 
Ages ("Periods of European Literature," Scribner); F. Harrison, "A 
Few Words About the Eighteenth Century," in The Choice of Books 
(Macmillan); Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (Chatto); 
* Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. 
(Macmillan); Mrs. Oliphant, Historical Characters of the Reign of Queen 
Anne (Century); * Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 
Vol. I, Chap. IV; Vol. VI, Chap. XXIII (Appleton); Dennis, The Age 
of Pope (Hand-books of English Literature) (Macmillan); Morris, Age of 
Anne, and also his Early Hanoverians, both in Epochs of History 
(Scribner); * Thackeray, English Humourists, ed. by Phelps (Holt); 
Dobson, William Hogarth (Dodd);Spence, Anecdotes and Observations of 
Books and Men from the Conversation of Mr. Pope, 2d ed., 1858 (J. R. 
Smith); Dobson, Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 3 series (Dodd). 

Alexander Pope. (Page 326.) Works, ed. by Elwin and Courthope, 
10 vols. (Murray); Poetical Works, ed. by Ward (Globe Edition); 
Essay on Man, also Satires and Epistles, ed. by Pattison (Clarendon 
Press). 



STUDY LISTS. 677 

Biography. L. Stephen, Alexander Pope (E. M. L.); Court hope, 
"Life," in Elwin and Courthope's edition of Works, Vol. V; Carruthers, 
Life, including Letters (Bohn). 

Criticism. Conington, " Poetry of Pope/' in Oxford Essays, 1858; 
L. Stephen, " Pope as a Moralist," in Hours in a Library, Vol. I (Put- 
nam); Essays in Lowell's My Study Windows; De Quincey's Bio- 
graphical Essays, and also in his Essays on the Poets; Hazlitt, " On 
Dryden and Pope," in Lectures on the English Poets (Bohn). 

Suggested Readings. "Spring," in Pastorals; " Windsor Forest," 
"Dying Christian to His Soul," "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfor- 
tunate Lady," " The Rape of the Lock," "An Essay on Man," "Epistle 
to Dr. Arbuthnot," "The Universal Prayer," "Ode on Solitude," 
Moral Essays, I. 

Some Minor Poets of Pope's Time. 

Matthew Prior. (Page 336.) Works, ed. by Johnson (Aldine 
Poets); Selected Poems, ed. by Dobson (Scribner). 

Biography. Dobson, "Matthew Prior," in Eighteenth Century Vignettes 
(Dodd); and also in the Introduction to his Works, ed. by Johnson. 

John Gay. (Page 337.) Poetical Works, ed. by Underhill, 2 vols. 
(Scribner); Poems, Riverside edition (Houghton). 

Biography and Criticism. Life, in Underhill's edition of his Works; 
Essays in Dobson's Miscellanies (Dodd) ; Westminster Review, Vol. CXL, 
1893. 

Thomas Parnell. (Page 339.) Poems, ed. by Aitken (Aldine 
Poets); Goldsmith, "Life of Parnell," in Works, Vol. IV (Bohn). 

Authorship in the Augustan Age. 

Page 340. See general references to England of Pope (Study List, 
p. 20), and especially Beljame's Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres en 
Angleterre au XVIII 9 Siecle (Hachette). 

Richard Steele. (Page 344.) Selections from Steele, being papers 
from the Toiler, Spectator, and Guardian, ed. by Dobson (Clarendon 
Press); * Selections, ed. by G. R. Carpenter (Ginn). 

Biography. Dobson, Richard Steele (E. W. S., Longmans); Aitken, 
Life of Richard Steele, 2 vols. (Scribner). 

Criticism. John Forster, "Richard Steele," in Biographical Essays 
(Murray); Thackeray in The English Humourists (Holt). 

Joseph Addison. (Page 351.) Works, ed. by Greene, 6 vols. (Mac- 
millan); Essays, chosen and ed. by J. R. Green (Macmillan); Criticisms 
on Paradise Lost, ed. by Cook (Ginn); Selections from Addison's papers 
in the Spectator, ed. by Arnold (Clarendon Press); Spectator, ed. by 
Morley, 3 vols. (Routledge); * Select Essays of Addison, with 
Macaulay's essay on Addison, ed. by Thurber (Allyn & Bacon). 



678 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Biography. Courthope, Addison (E. M. L.); Lucy Aiken, Life of 
Addison, 2 vols. (London, 1'843); Thackeray, Henry Esmond (passim). 

Criticism. Hazlitt, "Periodical Essayists," in English Comic Writers 
("Temple Classics"); Thackeray, in The English Humourists; 
Macaulay, essay on Addison (supra). 

The History of the Novel. (Page 357.) Raleigh, The English 
Novel from Its Origin to Sir Walter Scott (Scribner); Simonds, Introduc- 
tion to the Study of English Fiction (Heath); Cross, Development of the 
English Novel (Macmillan); Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction, 2 vols. 
(Bohn); Masson, British Novelists and their Styles (Lothrop); Tucker- 
man, History of English Prose Fiction (Putnam); Warren, History of 
the Novel Previous to the Seventeenth Century (Holt); Jusserand, English 
Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (Putnam); Stoddard, Evolution of 
the English Novel (Macmillan); Lanier, The English Novel (Scribner); 
Howells, Criticism and Fiction (Harper); Crawford, The Novel; What 
It Is (Macmillan); Matthews, Historical Novel and Other Essays; also 
his Aspects of Fiction (Scribner); Forsyth, Novels and Novelists of the 
Eighteenth Century (Appleton). 

Suggested Readings. (Page 361.) Overbury's "Characters," 
in his Works (Library of Old Authors, Scribner); Earle, Microcosmo- 
graphy (Arber's English Reprints); A Book of Characters, selected from 
the writings of Overbury, Earle and Butler (Edinburgh, 1865). Com- 
pare these character-studies with the De Coverley papers. 

Daniel Defoe. (Page 363.) Works, ed. by Aitken, 16 vols. (Dent)] 
Journal of the Plague Year (" Temple Classics ") ; Robinson Crusoe (Every- 
man 's Library); History and Life of Colonel Jacque, ed. by Aitken, 
2 vols. (Dent); 'Essay on Projects (Cassell's National Library); The 
Earlier Life and Chief Earlier Works, ed. by Morley (Carisbrooke 
Library); Selections from Defoe's Minor Novels, ed. by Saintsbury 
(Macmillan). 

Biography. Minto, Defoe (E. M. L.); Lee, Life, 3 vols. (London, 
1869); Wright, Life (Coates); Forster, "Defoe," in Historical and 
Biographical Essays (London, 1860). 

Criticism. *L. Stephen, "Defoe's Novels," in Hours in a Library, 
Vol. I (Putnam); Dennis, "Daniel Defoe," in Studies in English Litera- 
ture (London, 1876); Forster, in Historical and Biographical Essavs, 
Vol. II (London, 1858). 

Jonathan Swift. (Page 372.) Works, ed. by Temple Scott, with 
Biographical Introduction by Lecky, 12 vols. (Bohn); Gulliver's Travels 
("Temple Classics"); Tale of a Tub, and Other Works, ed. by Morley 
(Carisbrooke Library), includes selections from "Poems," and "Journal 
to Stella"; Stanley Lane-Poole, Letters and Journals of Jonathan Swift 
(Scribner). There are numerous expurgated editions of Gulliver's 
Travels, such as those published by Ginn & Co., and Maynard, Merrill 
&Co. 



STUDY LISTS. 679 

Biography. Craik, Life, 2 vols. (Macmillan); L. Stephen, Swift 
(E. M. L.). 

Criticism. Collins, Jonathan Swift; A Biographical and Critical Study 
(Chatto); Moriarty, Dean Swift and His Writings (Scribner); Thack- 
eray, in The English Humourists (Holt); Birrell, in Men, Women and 
Books (Scribner); Lecky, in Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland 
(Appleton); Masson, in The Three Devils (Macmillan). 

Other Prose Writers of the Early Eighteenth Century. 

John Arbuthnot. (Page 381.) Aitken, Life and Works (Clarendon 
Press). 

Lord Bolingbroke. (Page 382.) Works, with Life by Goldsmith, 
8 vols. (London, 1809 N ; Letters to Sir Wm. Wyndam and Pope (CasselTs 
National Library} ; Selections in Pancoast's Standard English Prose. 

Biography and Criticism. Harrop, Bolingbroke; a Political Study 
and Criticism (Kegan Paul);* Collins, Bolingbroke; an Historical Study 
(Harper); Birrell, in Essays About Men, Women, and Books (Scribner); 
Sichel, Bolingbroke and His Times, 2 vols. (Longmans). 

George Berkeley. (Page 385.) Works, ed. by Fraser, 4 vols. 
(Clarendon Press); Selections from Berkeley, ed. by Fraser (Clarendon 
Press). 

Biography and Criticism. Life, in Fraser's ed. of Works: * M. C. 
Tyler, "George Berkeley and his American Visit," in Three Men of 
Letters (Putnam). 

Richardson and Fielding. 

Samuel Richardson. (Page 388.) Works, 20 vols. (Lippincott), 

Biography. Dobson, Samuel Richardson (E. M. L); L. Stephen, in 
Hours in a Library, Vol. I (Putnam); Traill, in The New Fiction (New 
Amsterdam). 

Henry Fielding. (Page 390.) Works, ed. by Saintsbury, 12 vols. 
(Dent); Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, ed. by Dobson (Whittingham); 
Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and Amelia, in the Bohn Library. 

Biography and Criticism. Lawrence, Life and Times of Henry 
Fielding (London, 1855); Dobson, Henry Fielding (E. M. L.); Hazlitt, 
"On the English Novelists," in Lectures on the English Comic Writers; 
L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library, Vol. Ill (Putnam); G. B. Smith, "Our 
First Great Novelist," in Poets and Novelists (Smith and E.). 

Tobias Smollett. 

Tobias Smollett. (Page 391.) Works, ed. with memoir by Saints- 
bury, 12 vols. (Lippincott); Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and 
Humphrey Clinker, in the Bohn Library. 

Biography and Criticism. Hannay, Life (G. W. S.); Walter Scott, 
"Memoir," in Biographical Memoirs; Thackeray, in The English 
Humourists (Holt). 



PART IV. 
THE MODERN ENGLISH PERIOD. 

(Pages 393-625.) 

Beginning of Modern Literature. (Page 393-516.) 

History and Criticism. Mrs. Oliphant, Literary History of England 
in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, 
3 vols. (Macmillan); * Samtsbury, History of Nineteenth Century 
Literature, 1780-1895 (Macmillan); Herford, The Age of Wordsworth 
(Handbooks of English Literature Macmillan); Saintsbury, Essays 
on English Literature, 1780-1860 (Scribner); Beers, English Roman- 
ticism in the Eighteenth Century (Holt); * Phelps, Beginnings of the 
English Romantic Movement (Ginn); Perry, English Literature in the 
Eighteenth Century (Harper); Gosse, Eighteenth Century Literature 
(Macmillan); Dowden, French Revolution and English Literature (Scrib- 
ner); * Dowden, Studies in Literature, 1789-1877 (Scribner); Court- 
hope, "The Revolution in English Poetry and Fiction," in Cambridge 
Modern History, Vol. X, Chap. XXII (Macmillan). See also Vol. IV of 
Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (Macmillan). 

Samuel Johnson. (Page 401.) Works, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1823-25); 
Lives of the Poets, ed. by Hill, 3 vols. (Clarendon Press); Rasselus, 
ed. by Hill (Clarendon Press); Vanity of Human Wishes, ed. by Payne 
(Clarendon Press); Selections, ed. by Hill (Clarendon Press); Lives of 
the Poets, 3 vols. (Bohn); Letters, ei. by Hill, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press). 

Biography. * Bos well, Life, ed. by Hill, 6 vols. (Oxford Wareh.); 
L. Stephen, Johnson (E.M. L.); Grant, Life (G. W. S.); *Macaulay, 
Life, 1856, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. 

Criticism. L. Stephen, "Dr. Johnson's Writings," in Hours in a 
Library, Vol II (Putnam); Birrell, "Doctor Johnson," in Obiter Dicta, 
2d series (Scribner); Hill, Dr. Johnson; His Friends and His Critics 
(Smith, Elder); Seccombe, Age of Johnson (Handbooks of English 
Literature, Macmillan); Landor, "Imaginary Conversations between 
Samuel Johnson and John Home Tooke," in Imaginary Conversations, 
Vol. Ill (Dent); * Carlyle, "Samuel Johnson," in Critical and Miscel- 
laneous Essays; Macaulay, "Samuel Johnson," in Essays, Vol I (a 
review of Croker's ed. of Boswell). 

Suggested Readings. "London," " The Vanity of Human Wishes," 
"Rasselas," "Letter to Lord Chesterfield," lives of "Pope," "Gray," 
and "Collins, " or three or four other representative biographies, from 



STUDY LISTS. 681 

the Lives of the Poets; Prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick, at the opening 
of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. 

Edward Gibbon. (Page 403.) Morison, Gibbon (E. M. L.); Autobi- 
ography, ed. by G. B. Hill (Putnam); Bagehot, " Gibbon/' in Literary 
Studies, Vol. II. (Longmans). 

The Writers of the New School. 

Allan Ramsay. (Page 408.) Poems, with Life, 2 vols. (Paisley, 
1877); Poems, with Biographical Sketch by J. L. Robertson (Canter- 
bury Poets); Gentle Shepherd (Simpkin). 

Biography. Smeaton, Life (" Famous Scots," Scribner). 

James Thomson. (Page 410.) Poems, ed. by Tovey, 2 vols. (Aldine 
Poets); Seasons, and Castle of Indolence, ed. by Robertson (Clarendon 
Press); Same, ed. by Greene (Athenaeum Press). 

Biography. H. S. Salt, Life (London, 1889); Morel, James Thomson, 
sa vie et ses osuvres (Hachette); Bayne, Life ("Famous Scots," Scribner); 
Hazlitt, "Thomson and Cowper, " in Lectures on the English Poets 
(Dodd); Johnson, in Lives of the Poets (Clarendon Press). 

John Dyer. (Page 412.) Poems, ed. by Thomas (Welsh Library 
Unwin); Selections, with Essay by Dowden, in Ward's English Poets, 
Vol. Ill (Macmiilan). 

Biography. Johnson, in Lives of the Poets (Clarendon Press). 

William Collins. (Page 412.) Poems, with Memoir, ed. by Thomas 
(Aldine Poets); Selections, with Essay by Swinburne, in Ward's Eng- 
lish Poets, Vol. Ill (Macmiilan). 

Biography and Criticism. Johnson, in Lives of the Poets (Claren- 
don Press); Swinburne, in Miscellanies (Scribner). 

Thomas Gray. (Page 412.) Works in Prose and Verse, ed. by Gosse, 
4 vols. (Macmiilan); Poetical Works, ed. by Bradshaw (Aldine Poets); 
Letters, ed. by Tovey, 2 vols. (Bohn); Selections, ed. by Phelps (Athe- 
naeum Press). 

Biography. Gosse, Life (E. M. L.); Johnson, in Lives of the Poets 
(Clarendon Press); Lowell, in Latest Literary Essays (Houghton); M, 
Arnold, in Essays in Criticism, 2nd series (Macmiilan) . 

James Beattie. (Page 413.) Poems, ed. by Dyce (Aldine Poets). 

Thomas Chatterton. (Page 419.) Poetical Works, ed. by Skeat, 2 
vols. (Aldine Poets); Poetical Works, with Prefatory Notice by Rich- 
mond (Canterbury Poets); Selections, with Essay by Watts-Dunton, in 
Ward's English Poets, Vol. Ill (Macmiilan). 

Biography. Masson, Life (Dodd); Beers, in History of English 
Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (Holt); R. Noel, in Poetry and 
Poets (Kegan Paul). 



682 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

George Crabbe. (Page 413.) Poetical Works, with Life, ed. by hia 
Son (Scribner); The Borough (" Temple Classics "); Selected Poems (Can- 
terbury Poets). 

Biography and Criticism. Ainger, Life (E. M. L.); Kebbel, Life, 
in G. W. S. (Scribner); L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library, Vol. II 
(Putnam); Woodberry, in Makers of Literature (Macmillan); More, 
in Shelburne Essays, 2nd series (Putnam). 

William Blake. (Page 416.) Poems, with memoir by W. M. Rossetti 
(Aldine Poets); Poems, with specimens of prose writings (Canterbury 
Poets). 

Biography and Criticism. Gilchrist, Life (Macmillan); Swin- 
burne, William Blake; a Critical Essay (Chatto). 

Oliver Goldsmith. (Page 422.) Works, with Life, ed. by Gibbs, 
5 vols. (Bohn); Poems, Plays, and Essays, ed. by Aikin and Tuckerman 
(Crowell); Miscellaneous Works, ed. by Masson (Globe Ed.); Vicar of 
Wakefield, Poems and Plays (Morley's Universal Library); Selections 
from Goldsmith, ed. by Dobson (Clarendon Press); Vicar of Wakefield, 
ed. by Mary A. Jordan (Longmans); Select Poems, ed. by Rolfe (Ameri- 
can Book Co.); She Stoops to Conquer (CasselPs National Library); 
Plays (Bohn). 

Biography. Forster, Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, 2 vols. 
(Chapman and H.); Dobson, Life (G. W. S.); Black, Life (E. M. L.); 
Irving, Life (Putnam). 

Criticism. De Quincey, in Essays on the Poets; Macaulay, in Essays, 
Vol. IV; Dobson, "Goldsmith's Plays and Poems," in Miscellanies 
(Dodd); * Thackeray, in TJie English Humourists (Holt); Howitt, in 
Homes and Haunts of the British Poets (Routledge). 

Edmund Burke. (Page 429.) Selections from Burke, ed. by Payne, 
3 vols. (Clarendon Press); Works, 6 vols. (Bohn); Selections from Burke, 
ed. by Perry (Holt); Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful ("Temple 
Classics "); American Speeches and Letters on the Irish Question (Morley's 
Universal Library); Letter to a Noble Lord, with Introduction and 
notes, ed. by Smyth (Ginn). Most of the important works are printed 
separately in the Bohn Library. 

Biography. Prior, Life (Bohn); Morley, Life (E. M. L.). 

Criticism. Dowden, in The French Revolution and English Litera- 
ture (Scribner); L. Stephen, in History of English Thought in the Eight- 
eenth Century, Vol. II (Putnam); Buckle, in History of Civilization in 
England (Longmans); Woodrow Wilson, "The Interpreter of English 
Liberty," in Mere Literature (Houghton); Morley, Edmund Burke; 
an Historical Study (Macmillan). 

William Cowper. (Page 436.) Works, ed. by Benham (Globe Ed.); 
Selections from the Poetical Works, ed. by J. O. Murray (Athenseum 
Press); Selections from Cowper, with Life, ed. by Griffith, 2 vols. (Claren- 



STUDY LISTS. 683 

don Press) ; Selections from Poems, ed. by Oliphant (Macmillan) ; Letters, 
ed. by Benham (Macmillan); The Task( u Temple Classics "); Selections 
from "The Task," in Pancoast's Standard English Poems ; Selections 
in CasselPs National Library, and Canterbury Poets. 

Biography. Gold win Smith, Cowper (E. M. L.) ; Wright, Life 
(Unwin); Life, Southey, 2 vols. (Bohn); Benham, "Memoirs," in Globe 
Ed. of Works (Macmillan). 

Criticism. Bagehot, "William Cowper," in Literary Studies, Vol. I 
(Longman); * L. Stephen, "Cowper and Rousseau," in Hours in a 
Library, Vol. Ill (Putnam), Brooke, "Cowper," in Theology in the English 
Poets (Appleton); Woodberry, "Three Men of Piety — Bunyan, Cowper, 
Charming," in Studies in Letters and Life (Macmillan);* Sainte-Beuve, 
"Cowper," in English Portraits (Translations from Causeries du Lundi, 
(Holt); Dobson, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes (Dodd). 

Suggested Readings. Cowper's works will be found to repay close 
and repeated reading, both for their intrinsic merits and for their 
intimate relations to the literary and general history of his time. The 
student should make himself thoroughly familiar with the Letters, 
which can hardly be over-praised, and with The Task; he should know, 
of course, all the best of the shorter poems (Lines on the Receipt of My 
Mother's Picture, The Loss of the Royal George, The Castaway, John 
Gilpin, etc.), and he should have at least some acquaintance with the 
earlier poems (The Progress of Error, Tirocinium, etc.) which are often 
unduly neglected. 

Robert Burns. (Page 444.) Poetical Works, ed. by W. E. Henley 
(Houghton); Complete Works and Letters, ed. by Smith (Globe Ed.); 
Poems and Songs, 2 vols. " Temple Classics " ; Poems (Canterbury Poets) ; 
The Centenary Burns, ed. by Henley and Henderson, 4 vols. (Whit- 
taker); Selections from the Poems, ed. by Dow f Athenaeum Press); 
Life and Works, ed. by Chambers, revised by Wallace (Chambers). 

Biography. Shairp, Burns (E. M. L.); Blackie, Life (G. W. S.); 
Lockhart, Life, ed. by Douglass (Bohn). 

Criticism. *Carlyle, (a) "Burns," in Critical and Miscellaneous 
Essays; (b) "Burns, The Hero as Man of Letters," in Heroes and Hero 
Worship; a convenient edition containing both essays is in Longmans' 
English Classics; Shairp, "Scottish Song and Burns," in Aspects of 
Poetry (Houghton); Stevenson, "Some Aspects of Robert Burns," in 
Familiar Studies of Men and Books (Scribner); Hazlitt, in Lectures 
on the English Poets (Dodd); Lang, "To Burns," in Letters to Dead 
Authors (Scribner); Henley, "Life, Genius, Achievement," essay in 
his edition of the Works (Houghton); Brooke, "Burns," in Theology 
in the English Poets (Appleton); Forster, "Burns," in Great Teachers 
(Red way) ; see also poems on Burns by Wordsworth and Whittier. 

Suggested Readings. The following brief list contains only a few 
of Burn's more notable and familiar poems. It is intended as only an 
introduction to more extended study. 



684 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

I Songs: "O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast," "John Anderson, 
My Jo," " To Mary in Heaven," " Highland Mary," " Ye Banks and 
Braes o' Bonnie Doon," " Flow Gently Sweet Afton," " O, My Luve's 
like a Red, Red Rose," "Scots Wha Hae wi' Wallace Bled," "Is there 
for Honest Poverty," " Macpherson's Farewell," "Auld Lang Syne." 

II. Sympathy with Nature and Animals: " To a Mountain Daisy," 
" To a Mouse on Turning up her Nest with a Plough," " On Scaring 
some Water-fowl in Loch Turit," " On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp 
by Me." 

III. "Address to the Deil," "Address to the Unco' Guid." 

IV. "The Cotter's Saturday Night," "Tarn o' Shanter," " The Twa 
Dogs," " The Brigs of Ayr," " The Jolly Beggars/' The Holy Fair." 

William Wordsworth. (Page 450.) Works of William and Dorothy 
Wordsworth, ed. by Knight, 12 vols. (Macmillan); Poetical Works, ed. 
by Morley (Globe Ed.); Selections from the Poems, ed. by Dowden 
(Athenaeum Press); Selections, ed. by M. Arnold (Golden Treasury 
Series); Wordsworth's Prefaces, ed. by George (Heath); The Prelude, 
Sonnets } and The Excursion, 3 vols. (" Temple Classics "). 

Biography. Life, Vols. IX, X, XI, of Knight's ed. of Wordsworth's 
Works (Macmillan); * Myers, Life (E. M. L.); Rawnsley, Literary Asso- 
ciations of the English Lakes, 2 vols. (Macmillan) ;* Legouis, Early Life; 
a Study of the Prelude, translated by J. M. Matthews (Dent). 

Criticism. De Quincey, "On Wordsworth's Poetry," in Works 
(Masson's ed., Black); Saintsbury, "Wordsworth and Coleridge; Their 
Companions and Adversaries," in History of Criticism, Vol. Ill (Dodd); 
Hazlitt, (a) "On. Wordsworth, " in Lectures on the English Poets (Dodd)j 
(b) "Wordsworth," in Spirit of the Age (Macmillan); Bagehot, "Words- 
worth, Tennyson and Browning, " in Literary Studies, Vol. II (Long- 
mans); Shairp, (a) "Wordsworth, the Man and Poet," in Studies in 
Poetry and Philosophy (Houghton); (6) "The Three Yarrows," "The 
White Doe of Rylstone," in Aspects of Poetry (Houghton); Lowell, 
"Wordsworth," in Among my Books, Vol. II (Houghton); Hutton, 
"The Genius of Wordsworth," in Literaiy Essays (Macmillan); * L. 
Stephen, "Wordsworth's Ethics," in Hours in a Library, Vol. Ill (Put- 
nam); * Arnold, "Wordsworth," in Essays in Criticism, 2d series 
(Macmillan); Courthope, "Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry," in Liberal 
Movement in English Literature (Murray); Lee, Dorothy Wordsworth 
(Dodd); C. F. Johnson, "Wordsworth," in Three Americans and Three 
Englishmen (Whittaker); Aubrey de Vere, in Essays, Chiefly on Poetry 
(Macmillan); Pater, in Appreciations (Macmillan); Vida D. Scudder, 
"Wordsworth and the New Democracy," in Life of the Spirit in the 
Modern English Poets (Houghton); * Swinburne, "Wordsworth and 
Byron," in Miscellanies (Scribner); Fields, in Yesterdays with Authors 
(Houghton); R. W. Church, in Dante and other Essays (Macmillan); 
Magnus, A Primer of Wordsworth (Methuen); Calvert, Wordsworth 
(Lee & Shepard). 



STUDY LISTS. 685 

Suggested Readings. " Ode on Intimations of Immortality from 
Recollections of Early Childhood," "Ode to Duty," "To the 
Cuckoo," "The Reverie of Poor Susan," "My Heart Leaps Up," etc., 
"The Daffodils," "Three Years She Grew," etc.; "Lines on Revisiting 
Tintera Abbey," "Laodamia." Sonnets: "The World is Too Much 
With Us," " Milton," "Composed upon Westminster Bridge. September 
3, 1802." "They Dreamed Not of a Perishable Home," "Written in 
London, September, 1802"; "When I Have Borne in Memory What 
Has Tamed." Narrative: "Hart-leap Well," "Ruth," "Michael," 
"The Brothers," "Rob Roy's Grave." Lyrical: "The Solitary 
Reaper," "The Primrose of the Rock," "The Grave of Burns," "She 
Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways," "She was a Phantom of Delight," 
'The Affliction of Margaret," "A Poet's Epitaph," "Expostulation 
and Reply," "The Tables Turned." 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Page 459.) Poetical Works, ed. by 
Campbell (Globe Ed.); Friend, Biographia Literaria and Lay Sermons, 
Aids to Reflection and Confession of an Inquiring Spirit, Lectures on 
Shakespeare and other English Poets, all in the Bohn Library; * Selec- 
tions from Prose Writings, ed. by Beers (Holt); Letters, ed. by E. H. 
Coleridge, 2 vols. (Houghton). 

Biography. * Campbell, Life (Macmillan); Traill, Life (E. M. L.); 
Caine, Life (G. W. S.); Allsop, Letters, Conversations and Reflections of 
S. T. Coleridge, 2 vols. (1836); Cottle, Reminiscences of Coleridge and 
Southey (London, 1847); Sara Coleridge, Memoir and Letters (Harper). 

Criticism. Brandl, Coleridge and the English Romantic Movement, 
translated by Lady Eastlake (1887); Shairp, "Coleridge as Poet and 
Philosopher," in Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, 2d ed. (Hough- 
ton); Swinburne, in Essays and Studies (Scribner); Lowell, "Address 
in Westminster Abbey," in Democracy and Other Addresses (Houghton); 
C. F. Johnson, in Three Americans and Three Englishmen (Whittaker) ; 
Pater, in Appreciations (Macmillan) ; Woodberry, (a) " Coleridge and 
Sir George Beaumont," in Studies in Letters and Life (Macmillan); 
(b) "Coleridge," in Makers of Literature (Macmillan); Watson, "Cole- 
ridge's Supernaturalism," in Excursions in Criticism (Lane); Marti- 
neau, "Personal Influences on Our Theology — Coleridge," in Essays 
Philosophical and Theological, Vol. I (Holt); Tulloch, "Coleridge and 
His School," in Religious Thought in Britain during the Nineteenth 
Century (Scribner); Dowden, in New Studies in Literature (Scribner); 
Saintsbury, in Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 (Scribner); 
Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age (Macmillan); Brooke, in Theology in 
the English Poets (Appleton). 

Suggested Readings. " The Ancient Mariner," " Christabel," 
" Kubla Khan," " Destruction of the Bastile," " To a Young Lady, 
with Poems on the French Revolution," " France, an Ode," " Youth 
and Age," " Complaint and Reply," " Work Without Hope," " Dejec- 
tion, an Ode," " The Wanderings of Cain " (prose poem). The student 



686 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

should master at least as much of Coleridge's prose as is given in 
Beers' "Selections from Coleridge's Prose" {supra). Brief selections 
are given in Paflcoast's " Standard English Prose " (Holt). 

Sir Walter Scott (Page 470.) Waverley Novels, ed. by Lang 
(Estes); Waverley Novels, 25 vols. (Dryburgh Ed., Macmillan) ; Poetical 
Works, ed. by Lang 2 vols. (Macmillan); Poetical Works, ed. by 
Palgrave (Globe Ed.). 

Biography. Loekhart, Life (Macmillan); Journal of Sir Walter 
Scott, November, 1825, to April, 1832, 2 vols. (Harper); Gilfillan, Life 
(Edinburgh, 1884); Hutton, Life (E. M. L.); Saintsbury, Life (Scrib- 
ner); Lang, Life ("Literary Lives," Scribner). 

Criticism. Jeffrey, (a) "Lay of the Last Minstrel," (6) "The 
Waverley Novels," in Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (Appleton); 
Carlyle, in Miscellaneous Essays (Scribner); L. Stephen, "Some Words 
about Sir Walter Scott," in Hours in a Library, Vol. I (Putnam); 
Lang, in Letters to Dead Authors (Scribner); Shairp, "Homeric Spirit 
in Walter Scott," in Aspects of Poetry (Houghton); Lang, in his Intro- 
duction to Lyrics and Ballads of Sir Walter Scott (Scribner) ; Bagehot, 
"The Waverley Novels," in Literary Studies, Vol. II (Longmans); 
Masson, in British Novelists and Their Style (Lothrop); Saintsbury, 
in Essays in English Literature (Scribner); Hazlitt, "Scott and 
Dumas," in The Spirit of the Age (Macmillan). 

Suggested Readings. Any formal list of readings from Scott's 
works is, or ought to be, superfluous, but there is good reason to 
fear that Scott is neglected by readers of the present day to their great 
detriment. It should be a delight as well as a duty to read and re-read 
all of the "Waverley Novels," the "Journal" and at least "The Lay 
of the Last Minstrel," "Marmion," "The Lady of the Lake," "Rokeby" 
and the best of the shorter poems. A knowledge of Lockhart's "Life 
of Scott" (which, with Boswell's "Johnson" holds a foremost place in 
English biographical literature) is, of course, indispensable. 

Charles Lamb. (Page 480.) Works, ed. by Ainger, 6 vols. (Mac- 
millan); Essays of Elia, Last Essays of Elia, Essays and Sketches, all 
in " Temple Classics"; Tales from Shakespeare, ed. by Ainger (Macmil- 
lan); Dramatic Essays, ed. by Matthews (Dodd). 

Biography and Criticism. * Ainger, Lamb (E. M. L.); Lucas, 
Life, 2 vols. (Putnam); Annie Gilchrist, Life of Mary Lamb (Famous 
Women) (Little); Talfourd, Memoirs of Charles Lamb (Gibbings); 
Hazlitt, The Lambs (Scribner); Proctor (Barry Cornwall), Charles 
Lamb (Little); De Quincey, (a) "Recollections," (6) "C. Lamb," in his 
Works, ed. by Masson, Vols. Ill and V (Black); Swinburne, "Charles 
Lamb and George Wither," in Miscellanies (Scribner) ; Birrell,(a) in Obiter 
Dicta, 2nd Series (Scribner); (b) in Res Judicata? (Scribner); Pater, in 
Appreciations (Macmillan); Harrison, "Lamb and Keats," in Tennyson, 
Ruskin, Mill and Other Essays (Macmillan); Woodberry, "Charles 
Lamb, or Elia," in Makers of Literature (Macmillan). 



STUDY LISTS. 687 

Suggested Readings. Essays of Elia: "Christ's Hospital Five 
and Thirty Years Ago," "The Two Races of Men," "The Old and 
New Schoolmaster," "Valentine's Day," "Modern Gallantry," "Dream 
Children; a Reverie," "Distant Correspondents," "A Dissertation 
upon Roast Pig," "A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married 
People," "Captain Jackson." Criticism and Poetry. "On the Trage- 
dies of Shakespeare," "Hester," "The Old Familiar Faces." 

Thomas De Quincey. (Page 482.) Works, ed. by D. Masson, 14 
vols. (Black); Confessions of an Opium Eater ("Temple Classics") 

* Joan of Arc and English Mail Coach, ed. by J. M. Hart (Holt) 

* Flight of a Tartar Tribe, ed. by C. S. Baldwin (Longmans); Selections 
ed. by Bliss Perry (Doubleday); Selections, ed. by M. H. Turk (Athe- 
nseum Press). 

Biography and Criticism. A. H. Japp (H. A. Page, pseud.), Life 
and Writings (Scribner); De Quincey Memorials, ed. by Japp, 2 vols. 
(Heinemann); Burton, "A Vision of Mighty Book Hunters," in The 
Book Hunter (Lippincott); * Masson, Life (E. M.L.); Findlay, Per- 
sonal Recollections of De Quincey (A. and C. Black); L. Stephen, in Hours 
in a Library, Vol. I (Putnam); Saintsbury, in Essays in English Litera- 
ture, 1780-1860 (Scribner); Masson, "Prose and Verse — De Quincey," 
in Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and other Essays (Macmillan). 

Suggested Readings. The various books of selections from De 
Quincey, given above, form an admirable introduction to the more 
extended study of his work, and make a list of readings unnecessary. 
Mention must be made, however, of the papers on " Murder Considered 
as One of the Fine Arts," remarkable not only for their irony and 
humour, but also for thsir narrative passages. A most charming 
example of De Quincey's humour will be found in the third chapter of 
his Autobiography. 

Byron and Shelley. 

Lord Byron. (Page 491.) Works, ed. by Prothero and Coleridge, 
12 vols. (Scribner); Childe Harold, ed. by H. E. Tozer (Clarendon 
Press); Selections, ed. by M. Arnold (Golden Treasury Series); Selec- 
tions, ed. by F. J. Carpenter (Holt); Letters (Camelot Series); Siege of 
Corinth (" Temple Classics "). 

Biography. Roden Noel, Life (G. W. S.); Nichol, Life (E. M. L.); 
Elze, Lord Byron (Murray); Jeaffreson, The Real Lord Byron (Amster- 
dam); Thomas Moore, Life (Murray); R. C. Dallas, Recollections of Lord 
Byron (Philadelphia, 1825); Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and His Con- 
temporaries (Philadelphia, 1828); J. Kennedy, Conversations with Lord 
Byron (London, 1830); Trelawney, Recollections of Shelley and Byron 
(Frowde). 

Criticism. Hazlitt, in Spirit of the Age (Macmillan); Macaulay, in 
Essays, Vol. I (Longmans); Mazzini. "Byron and Goethe," in Life and 



688 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Writings, Vol. VI (Smith, Elder), also in his Essays (Camelot Series); 
Morley, in Miscellanies, Vol. I (Macmillan); Swinburne, (a) in Essays 
and Studies (Scribner), (b) "Wordsworth and Byron," in Miscellanies 
(Scribner); M. Arnold, in Essays in Criticism, 2d series (Macmillan); 
Lang, in Letters to Dead Authors (Scribner) ; Roden Noel, " Lord Byron 
and His Times," in Essays on Poetry and Poets (Kegan Paul); Dawson, 
in Makers of Modern English (Whittaker); Trent, "The Byron Revi- 
val," in Authority of Criticism (Scribner); Woodberry, "The Byron 
Centenary," in Makers of Literature (Macmillan). 

Suggested Readings. "The Prisoner of Chillon," "There's not a 
Joy the World Can Give," "Childe Harold" (Cantos III and IV), 
"Lines on Completing His Thirty-sixth Year," "She Walks in Beauty 
Like the Night," "The Destruction of the Host of Sennacherib," 
"Manfred," "Cain." 

Percy Bysshe Shelley. (Page 497.) Works, prose and verse, ed. by 
H. B. Forman, 8 vols. (Scribner); Poetical Works, ed. by Forman, 5 
vols. (Aldine Poets); Poetical Works, ed. by Dowden; (Globe Ed.); 
Selections (Golden Treasury Series, also Heath's English Classics); 
Essays and Letters (Camelot Series); Select Poems, ed. by W. J. Alexan- 
der (Athenaeum Press); Poems, ed. by Brooke (Macmillan); Prometheus 
Unbound, ed. by V. D. Scudder (Heath). 

Biography. Dowden, Life (Scribner); Shairp, Life (G. W. S.); 
Symonds, Life (E. M. L.); D. F. MacCarthy, Early Life (London, 1872); 
G. B. Smith, A Critical Biography (Edinburgh, 1877); W. M. Rossetti, 
"Memoir," in his edition of the Poems (Moxon); J. C. Jeaffreson, The 
Real Shelley, 2 vols. (Hurst and B.); Helen Moore, Mary Wollstonecraft 
Shelley (Lippincott); F. Rabbe, Shelley: The Man and Poet, 2 vols. 
(London, 1888); Leigh Hunt, in Lord Byron and His Contemporaries 
(Philadelphia, 1828); De Quincey, "Notes on Shelley," in Works, 
Masson's ed., Vol. XI (Black); T. J. Hogg, Life (to 1814), 2 vols. 
(London, 1858); Trelawney, Recollections of Shelley and Byron 
(Frowde); Shelley Memorials, ed. by Lady Shelley (London, 1859); 
Biagi, Last Days of Shelley, New Details from Unpublished Documents 
(Unwin). 

Criticism. Bagehot, in Literary Studies, Vol. I (Longmans); Masson, 
in Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats (Macmillan); H. S. Salt, A Shelley 
Primer (Reeves and T.); Hutton, "Shelley's Poetical Mysticism," in 
Essays Theological and Literary, Vol. II (2d ed. 1877, Macmillan); 
Shairp, "Shelley as a Lyric Poet," in Aspects of Poetry (Houghton); 
C. F. Johnson, in Three Americans and Three Englishmen (Whittaker) ; 
Lang, "To Shelley," in Letters to Dead Authors (Scribner); Roden Noel, 
in Essays on Poetry and Poets (Kegan Paul); Dowden, (a) "Shelley's 
Philosophical View of Reform," (6) "Last Words on Shelley," in 
Transcripts and Studies (Scribner); M. Arnold, in Essays in Criticism, 
2d series (Macmillan); Woodberry, in Studies in Letters and Life 
(Macmillan); Dawson, in Makers of Modern Literature (Whittaker): 



STUDY LISTS. 689 

Trent, "Apropos of Shelley," in Authority of Criticism (Scribner); 
* Vida D. Scudder, "The Prometheus Unbound of Shelley," in Atlantic 
Monthly, Vol. LXX, 1892. 

Suggested Readings. "Adonais," "The Sensitive Plant," 
"Alastor," "Prometheus Unbound." Shorter Poems: "The Skylark," 
"The Cloud," "Ode to the West Wind," "Arethusa," "Lines written 
among the Euganean Hills," "Stanzas written in Dejection, near 
Naples," "Mont Blanc," "Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni " (c/. 
Coleridge's "Mont Blanc"), "Mutability," "A Lament," " One Word 
is too often Profaned." In studying Shelley as a lyric poet the reader 
should turn, in addition to the above, to the choruses in " Prometheus 
Unbound" and "Hellas." Note particularly the "Life of Life, thy 
Lips Enkindle," from the former, and the last chorus from the latter 
of these two poems. 

John Keats. (Page 504.) Complete Works, ed. by Forman, 5 vols. 
(Crowell); Poetical Works, ed. by Forman (Clarendon Press); Poetical 
Works, ed. by Lord Houghton (Aldine Poets); Poems, ed. by Palgrave 
(Golden Treasury Series); Selections, ed. by Arlo Bates (Athenaeum 
Press). 

Biography. * Colvin, Life (E. M. L.); W. M. Rossetti, Life 
(G. W. S.); Love Letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne, ed by Forman 
(Reeves and T.); Letters of Keats to His Family and Friends, ed. by 
Colvin (Macmillan). 

Criticism. Masson, in Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats (Macmillan); 
Lowell, in Among My Books, 2d series (Houghton); *M. Arnold, in 
Essays in Criticism, 2d series (Macmillan); Swinburne, in Miscellanies 
(Scribner); Roden Noel, in Essays on Poetry and Poets (Kegan Paul); 
Woodberry, "The Promise of Keats," in Studies in Letters and Life 
(Macmillan); Hudson, in Studies in Interpretation (Putnam); 
Courthope, "Poetry, Music and Painting: Coleridge and Keats," 
in Liberal Movement in English Literature (Murray); M. Schuyler, 
"Centenary of Keats," in Forum, Vol. XX, 1895; Watson, "Keats 
and Mr. Colvin," in Excursions in Criticism (Macmillan). 

Suggested Readings. 1. Romantic and Mediaeval: "The Eve of 
St. Agnes," "The Eve of St. Mark," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." 
Classical Poems: "Lamia," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Hyperion." 
Personal Poems, Odes, Sonnets, etc: "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode 
to Autumn," "Ode on Melancholy," "Robin Hood." Sonnets: "On 
First Looking into Chapman's Homer," "Keen, Fitful Gusts are Whis- 
pering Here and There," "To One Who has been Long in City Pent," 
"On the Sea," "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles," "Bright Star, Would 
I Were Steadfast as Thou Art " (Keats' last sonnet). 



690 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Victorian England 

(Pages 516-625.) 

I. HISTORY AND CRITICISM. History of England. Part III 
by T. F. Tout (Rivingtons) ; McCarthy, History of Our Own Times 
from the Accession of Queen Victoria to 1880, 2 vols. (Harper); 
McCarthy, The Epoch of Reform, 1830-1850 (Scribner) ; McCarthy, 
England under Gladstone (Scribner); Walpole, History of England 
since 1815 (Longmans). The Reign of Queen Victoria, ed. by T. H. 
Ward, 2 vols. (Smith, Elder), includes a good chapter on Victorian 
literature. Oman, England in the Nineteenth Century (Longmans) ; 
Paul, History of Modern England, 5 vols. (Macmillan); Escott, 
Social Transformations of the Victorian Age (Seeley) ; Huxley, 
Advance of Science in the Last Half Century (Appleton). 

II. LITERARY HISTORY AND CRITICISM. For general 

literary movements of the time, Dowden's Studies in Literature 
(Macmillan) and Dowden's Transcripts and Studies (Macmillan) 
will be found especially helpful. For a comparison of Elizabethan 
with Victorian poetry see J. A. Symonds, Essays Speculative and 
Suggestive, Vol. II (Chapman) ; Stedman, Victorian Poets (Houghton) ; 
F. Harrison, Studies in Early Victorian Literature (Lane) ; Beers, 
English Romanticism in XIX Century (Holt) ; Saintsbury, History 
of Nineteenth Century Literature, 1780-1895 (Macmillan); Saints- 
bury, Essays on English Literature, 1780-1860 (Dent, 1895); 
* Walker, The Age of Tennyson (Bell) ; Oliphant, Victorian Litera- 
ture (Macmillan) ; Scudder, Life of the Spirit in the Modern English 
Poets (Houghton) ; Dawson, Makers of English Prose, Makers of 
English Poetry, and Makers of English Fiction (Revell) ; Traill in 
The New Fiction and Other Essays (Amsterdam). 

Macaulay. (Page 526.) Works, edited by Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. 
(Longmans) ; Essays on Addison, Milton, and the two essays on 
Johnson, are published in Longmans' English Classics. The His- 
torical Essays of Macaulay, and the Select Essays of Macaulay, 
edited by S. Thurber (Allyn and Bacon); Critical and Historical 
Essays, 5 vols. ("Temple Classics"); The Lays of Ancient Rome, 
ed. by Rolfe (Harper). 

Biography and Criticism. Trevelyan, Life and Letters, 2 vols. 
(Harper), is the standard life. Morrison, Life (E. M. L.) ; Bagehot, 
Essay in Literary Studies, Vol. II (Longmans); J. Morley, in 
Miscellanies, Vol. I (Macmillan); M. Arnold, in Mixed Essays 
(Macmillan) ; F. Harrison, in Studies in Early Victorian Writers 
(Lane); L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library, Vol. Ill (Putnam). 

Carlyle. (Page 529.) Works, Introduction by H.D. Traill, 30 vols., 
Centenary Ed. (Scribner) ; Carlyle's Correspondence with Emerson, 2 
vols., ed. by C. E. Norton (Houghton); Heroes and Hero-Worship, 
also Sartor Resartus, ed. by MacMechan (Athenaeum Press) ; Essay 



STUDY LISTS. 691 

on Burns, ed. by Gore (Macmillan)] Critical and Miscellaneous 
Essays (Appleton). 

Biography. Froude, Thomas Carlyle; A History of the First Forty 
Years of His Life, 2 vols. (Harper) ; Froude, Thomas Carlyle; A His- 
tory of His Life in London, 1834-1881, 2 vols. (Harper) ; Alex. Carlyle, 
New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 2 vols. (Lane) ; Garnett, Life (G.W. S.) *, 
Nichol, Life (E. M. L.) ; Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, 
ed. by Froude, 2 vols. (Scribner); Alex. Carlyle, New Letters and 
Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, 2 vols. (Lane) ; Masson, Thomas 
Carlyle Personally and in His Writings (Macmillan) ; Macpherson, 
Thomas Carlyle ("Famous Scots," Scribner). 

Criticism. Japp, Three Great Teachers of Our Own Time (Smith, 
Elder) ; John Morley, in Miscellanies, Vol. I (Macmillan) ; Lowell, 
in Literary Essays, Vol. II (Houghton) ; Peter Bayne, in Lessons 
from My Masters (Harper); Shairp, "Prose Poets, Carlyle," in 
Aspects of Poetry (Houghton); John Tulloch, "Thomas Carlyle as 
a Religious Teacher," in Movements of Religious Thought in Britain 
(Longmans) ; Birrell, in Obiter Dicta, Vol. I (Scribner) ; Hutton, in 
Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith (Macmillan) ; 
Arnold, " Emerson," in Addresses in America (Macmillan) ; Frederick 
Harrison, in Studies in Early Victorian Writers (Lane) ; Robertson, 
in Modern Humanists (Sonnenschein) ; Brownell, in Victorian Prose 
Masters (Scribner). 

Suggested Readings. Among the most notable and representa- 
tive of Carlyle 's shorter works are : *Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero 
Worship, Past and Present, the Inaugural address at Edinburgh On 
the Choice of Books, and the essays on *Burns, Johnson, and Richter. 

Ruskin. (Page 541.) Works, Brantwood Ed., 20 vols., ed. by 
C. E. Norton (Longmans) ; *Scudder, An Introduction to the Writings 
of John Ruskin (Leach). [This consists of selections from Ruskin, 
admirably classified.] Selected Essays and Letters, ed. by Harford 
(Ginn); Sesame and Lilies, ed. by Root (Holt). 

Biography and Criticism. *John Ruskin, Praterita, Scenes and 
Thoughts of My Past Life (Wiley Sons) ; Collingwood, The Life and 
Work of John Ruskin, 2 vols. (Houghton) ; Geddes, John Ruskin 
Economist, ed. by Baildor (Simpkin); Mather, John Ruskin, His 
Life and Teaching (Warne) ; Waldstein, John Ruskin, His Influence 
Upon Modern Thought and Life (Harper) ; Hobson, John Ruskin, 
Social Reformer (Estes) ; Saintsbury, "Ruskin," in Corrected Impres- 
sions (Dodd); Frederick Harrison, "Ruskin as a Master of Prose," 
"Ruskin as a Prophet," "Ruskin's Eightieth Birthday," in Tenny- 
son, Ruskin, Mill (Macmillan) ; and *Life in E. M. L.; Brownell, 
in Victorian Prose Masters (Scribner) ; Robertson, in Modern 
Humanists (Sonnenschein). 

Suggested Readings. Sesame and Lilies (fine in places, but full 
of exaggeration, false criticism, and inconsistency), *The Crown of 



692 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Wild Olive, Unto This Last, Fors Clavigera, Letters V and VIII; 
Modern Painters, Part III, section . 1, Chap. XV; "The Theoretic 
Faculty," ibid, section 2; "The Imaginative Faculty," Chaps. I-V. 

J. H. Newman. (Page 548.) Apologia pro vita sua; Idea of a 
University and The Dream of Gerontius (Longmans). * Selections, 
with introduction by L. E. Gates (Holt). 

Biography and Criticism. Life, by R. H. Hutton (Houghton) 
and by W. S. Lilly in D. N. B. Essays by * R. H. Hutton in Modern 
Guides of English Thought (Macmillan), and Shairp^n Aspects of 
Poetry (Houghton). See also works of R. W. Church and others 
on " The Oxford Movement." 

James Anthony Froude. (Page 552.) Paul, Life (Scribner). 

Walter Pater and Literary Criticism. (Page 553.) Saintsbury, in 
History of Criticism, Vol. Ill, Bk. IX, Chaps. II-III (Dodd); Wright, 
Life of Walter Pater, 2 vols. (Putnam); Benson, Walter Pater (E. M. L.); 
H. F. Brown, John Addington Symonds, 2 vols. (Nimmo); Maitland, 
Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (Putnam). 

Matthew Arnold. (Page 553.) Complete Works, 14 vols. (Mac- 
millan); Poetical Works (Globe Ed.); Selected Poems (Golden Treasury 
Series); Selections from Prose, ed. by L. E. Gates (Holt). 

Biography and Criticism. Paul, Life (E. M. L.); Russell, Life 
(" Literary Lives," Scribner); Saintsbury, Life (Dodd); Lang, in Century 
Magazine, Vol. I, p. 849, 1881-82; Hutton, (a) "Poetry of Matthew 
Arnold," in Essays, Theological and Literary, Vol. II (Macmillan); (6) 
"Arnold," in Modern Guides of English Thought (Macmillan); Brownell, 
in Victorian Prose Masters (Scribner) ; Woodberry, in Makers of Litera- 
ture (Macmillan); Harrison, (a) in Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other 
Essays (Macmillan); (6) "Culture; a Dialogue," in The Choice of 
Books (Macmillan); Shairp, Culture and Religion (Houghton); Robert- 
son, in Modern Humanists (Scribner); Jacobs, in Literary Studies 
(Scribner); Hudson, in Studies in Interpretation (Putnam); Forman, 
in Our Living Poets (Tinsley); Stedman, in Victorian Poets (Houghton); 
Swinburne, in Essays and Studies (Scribner); Amy Sharp, in Victorian 
Poets (Scribner). 

Suggested Readings. Poetry: "Switzerland," "Isolation," "To 
Marguerite," "Absence," "Dover Beach," "The Scholar-Gypsy," 
"Thyrsis," "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," "Tristam and 
Iseult," "Sohrab and Rustum," "The Forsaken Merman," "To a 
Gipsy Child by the Seashore," "Lines written in Kensington Gar- 
dens," "Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann." Sonnets: 
" Shakespeare," "The Good Shepherd with the Kid," "East London," 
"Geist's Grave." Prose: "The Function of Criticism," in Essays 
in Criticism, 1st series; "The Study of Poetry," and "Milton," in 
ibid. 2d series: "Celtic Literature," "Numbers," in Discourses in 
America. Extracts from Arnold's prose, with admirable introduction, 
are given in Edward T. McLaughlin's Literary Criticism (Holt). 



STUDY LISTS. 693 



The Novel. 



Maria Edgeworth. (Page 556.) * Castle Rackrent and The Ab~ 
sentee, with an Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie (Macmillan). 

Biography. Hare, Life and Letters, 2 vols. (Houghton); Lawless, 
Life (E. M. L.); Ritchie, in A Book of Sibyls (Smith, Elder). 

Jane Austen. (Page 557.) Works, ed. by R. B. Johnson, 10 vols. 
(Macmillan). 

Biography and Criticism. Goldwin Smith, Life (G. W. S.); 
Adams, Life (Lee and Shepard); Memoir, by her Nephew, Austen 
Leigh (Macmillan); Mrs. Ritchie, in A Book of Sibyls (Smith, Elder); 
Pollock, Jane Austen, Her Contemporaries and Herself (Longmans); 
Dawson, in Makers of English Fiction (Revell). 

Charles Kingsley. (Page 558.) Alton Locke, with memoir by 
Thomas Hughes, Hereward, Westward Ho! (Macmillan). 

Biography and Criticism. Letters and Memories of His Life, ed. 
by His Wife, 2 vols. (Macmillan); Stubbs, Charles Kingsley and the 
Christian Social Movement (Stone); L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library, 
Vol. Ill (Putnam); Dawson, in Makers of English Fiction (Revell). 

Charles Dickens. (Page 558.) Biography and Criticism, Forster; 
Life, 2 vols. (Scribner); Ward, Life (E. M. L.); Marzials, Life (G. W. S.); 
Mamie Dickens, My Father as I Recall Him (Dutton); Pierce and 
Wheeler, The Dickens Dictionary (Houghton); Gissing, Charles 
Dickens, a Critical Study (Dodd); F. Harrison, in Studies in Early 
Victorian Literature (Lane); Bagehot, in Literary Studies, Vol. II 
(Longmans); Lilly, in Four English Humorists of the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury (Murray). 

William Makepeace Thackeray. (Page 560.) Works, Bio- 
graphical edition, ed. by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, 13 vols. (Harper). 

Biography and Criticism. Trollope, Life (E. M. L.); Merivale 
and Marzials, Life (G.W.S.); Melville, Life, 2 vols. (Stone); G. B. 
Smith, in Poets and Novelists (Smith, Elder); Lilly, in Four English 
Humorists of the Nineteenth Century (Murray); Brownell, in Victorian 
Prose Masters (Scribner) ; F. Harrison, in Studies in Early Victorian 
Literature (Lane); Wilson, Thackeray in the United States, 1852-3, 
1855-6; including a Record of Thackerayana (Dodd). 

George Eliot. (Page 562.) Works, Personal ed., 12 vols. (Double- 
lay); Adam Bede, 2 vols., Silas Marner ("Temple Classics"). 
Biography and Criticism. Cross, Life, 3 vols. (Harper); L. Stephen, 
ife (E. M. L.); O. Browning, Life (G. W. S.); Cooke, George Eliot; 
Critical Study of Her Life and Writings (Houghton); Blind, Life 
amous Women) (Little); Parkinson, Scenes from the George Eliot 
entry (Simpkin); Hutton, (a) "George Eliot as an Author," in 
iern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith (Macmillan); 
'George Eliot." in Essays in Literary Criticism (Coates); F. Harrison, 



694 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

in Studies in Early Victorian Literature (Lane); H. James, in Partial 
Portraits (Macmillan); Brownell, in Victorian Prose Masters (Scribner); 
Jacobs, in Literary Studies (Scribner) ; Lilly, in Four English Humorists 
of the Nineteenth Century (Murray); *Dowden, " George Eliot,'' "Middle- 
march and Daniel Deronda," in Studies in Literature (Scribner); J. C. 
Brown, Ethics of George Eliot's Works (Blackwood); Lanier, in The 
English Novel (Scribner); Rev. Charles G. Ames, George Eliot's Two 
Marriages (Arnold & Co.). 

Anthony Trollope. (Page 572.) Chronicles of Barsetshire, 13 vols, 
(Dodd). 

Biography and Criticism. Autobiography (Harper); Saintsbury, 
in Corrected Impressions (Dodd); F. Harrison, in Studies in Early 
Victorian Literature (Lane); H. James, in Partial Portraits (Macmillan). 

The Brontes. (Page 574.) Works of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne 
Bronte, Haworth Edition, ed. by Mrs. Humphry Ward, 7 vols. 
(Harper); Jane Eyre, 2 vols., Shirley, 2 vols., Wuthering Heights and 
Agnes Grey, 2 vols. (" Temple Classics "). 

Biography and Criticism: Mrs. Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Bronte, 
Haworth Ed. (Harper); Birrell, Life of Charlotte Bronte (G. W. S.); 
Swinburne, Note on Charlotte Bronte (Scribner); A. M. F. Robinson, Life 
of Emily Bronte (Little); Shorter and Nichol, The Brontes and Their 
Circle (Dodd); Mackay, The Brontes in Fact and Fiction (Dodd); W. W. 
Kinsley, "The Bronte Sisters," in Views on Vexed Questions (Lippin- 
cott); Swinburne, "Emily Bronte," in Miscellanies (Scribner); F. Harri- 
son, "Charlotte Bronte," in Studies in Early Victorian Literature (Lane). 

Robert Loui's Stevenson. (Page 575.) Works, Biographical edition. 
ed. by Mrs. Stevenson, 25 vols. (Scribner). 

Biography and Criticism. Balfour, Life, 2 vols. (Scribner); Corn- 
ford, Life (Dodd); Raleigh, Life (Lane); Letters to His Family and 
Friends, ed. by Colvin, 2 vols. (Scribner); Vailima Letters to Sidney 
Colvin, 2 vols. (Stone); Mrs. M. I. Stevenson, Letters from Samoa, 
1891-95, ed. by Marie C. Balfour (Scribner); Strong and Osbourne, 
Memories of Vailima (Scribner); Japp, Robert Louis Stevenson; a 
Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial (Scribner); Kelman, The Faith 
of Robert Louis Stevenson (Revell); Genung, Stevenson's Attitude to 
Life (Crowell); Dawson, in Makers of English Fiction (Revell); Torrey> 
in Friends on the Shelf (Houghton); Baildon, "Robert Louis Stevenson: 
Essayist, Novelist, and Poet," in Living Age, Vol. CCXXI, 1899. 

George Meredith. (Page 577.) Works, Boxhill Ed., 16 vols. 
(Scribner). 

Biography and Criticism. J. Lane, Life (Lane); Le Gallienne, 
George Meredith, Some Characteristics (Lane); Hannah Lynch, George 
Meredith, a Study (Methuen); Monkhouse, "Novels of George Mere- 
dith," in Books and Plays (Lane); Brownell, in Victorian Prose Masters 
(Scribner); Dawson, in Makers of English Fiction (Revell); Gosse, 



STUDY LISTS. 695 

"Historic Place of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy," in Interna- 
tional Monthly, Vol. IV, 1901; G. M. Trevelyan, Poetry and Philosophy 
of George Meredith (Scribner). 

Thomas Hardy. (Page 579.) Works (Harper). 

Biography and Criticism. Annie Macdonnell, Thomas Hardy 
(Dodd); *L. Johnson, Art of Thomas Hardy (Lane); Windle, Wessex of 
Thomas Hardy, (Lane); Dawson, in Makers of English Fiction (Revell); 
Vincent, in The Bibliotaph (Houghton); "The Novels of Thomas 
Hardy," in Westminster Review, Vol. CXIX, 1883; Gosse, "Historic 
Place of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy," in International 
Monthly, Vol. IV, 1901. 

The Pre-Raphaelites. (Page 582.) 

History and Criticism. Beers, History of English Romanticism in 
the Nineteenth Century (Holt); Vida D. Scudder, Life of the Spirit in 
the Modern English Poets (Houghton); Bate, English Pre-Raphaelite 
Painters (Macmillan); Esther Wood, Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite 
Movement (Scribner); W. M. Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and 
Letters (Scribner); HolmanHunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphael- 
ite Brotherhood, 2 vols. (Macmillan). 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (Page 583.) Poetical Works, ed. by W. 
M. Rossetti, 2 vols. (Scribner); Early Italian Poets. Vita Nuova 
(Macmillan). 

Biography and Criticism. Knight, Life (G. W. S.); Benson, Life 
(E. M. L.); Swinburne, "Essays," in Miscellanies (Scribner); Forman, 
in Our Living Poets (Tinsley); W. Sharp, Rossetti; a Record and a Study 
(London, 1882); Caine, Recollections of Rossetti (Little); W. M. Rossetti, 

(a) D. G. Rossetti; His Family Letters, with Memoir, 2 vols. (Little) ; 

(b) Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pre-Raphaelitism; Papers, 1854-1861 (Dodd); 
Myers, "Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty," in Modern Essays 
(Macmillan); Pater, in Appreciations (Macmillan); Esther Wood, 
Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (Scribner). 

Suggested Readings. "The Blessed Damozel," "Love's Nocturn," 
"The Burden of Nineveh," "A Last Confession," "Jenny," "The 
Ballad of Dead Ladies," "The Sea Limits," "Rose Mary," "The White 
Ship," "The King's Tragedy," "World's Worth"; Sonnets, "Sibylla 
Palmifera," in House of Life, Sonnet XIX, and "The Choice," Sonnets 
LXXI, LXXII, v. also LXIIT. 

William Morris. (Page 586.) The Earthly Paradise, Defence of 
Guenevere, Story of Sigurd the Volsung, Story of the Glittering Plain, 
Tale of the House of the Wolfings, all published by Longmans ; Volsunga 
Saga (Camelot Series); Dream of John Ball (Longmans). 

Biography and Criticism. Mackail, Life, 2 vols. (Longmans); 
Vallance, William Morris; His Art, Writings and Public Life (Macmil- 
lan); Swinburne, "The Life and Death of Jason," in Essays and Studies 
(Scribner); Saintsbury, in Corrected Impressions (Dodd); Pater, "Es- 
thetic Poetry," in Appreciations (Macmillan); Forman, in Our Living 



696 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Poets (Tinsley); Symons, in Studies in Two Literatures (Simpkin); 
Dawson, in Makers of English Poetry (Revell); Nordby, Influence of 
Old Norse Literature upon English Literature (Macmillan). 

Suggested Readings. The Earthly Paradise, A Dream of John Ball, 
Story of Sigurd the Volsung. 

Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Page 590.) Poems, 6 vols. (Harper); 
Poetical Works, Introduction by R. H. Stoddard (Croweli); Atalanta 
in Calydon (Chatto); Erechtheus (Chatto); * Select Poems, Introduction 
by W. M. Payne (Belles-Lettres Series, Heath). 

Biography and Criticism. Wratislaw, Critical Study of Swinburne 
(Wessels) ; Forman, in Our Living Poets (Tinsley) ; Saintsbury, in Cor- 
rected Impressions (Dodd); *Stedman, in Victorian Poets (Houghton); 
Dawson, in Makers of English Poztry (Revell); Lowell, "Swinburne's 
Tragedies," in I literary Essays, Vol. II (Houghton); Gosse, in Century, 
Vol. LXIV, 1902; G. Barlow, "On the Spiritual Side of Mr. Swin- 
burne's Genius," in Contemporary Review, Vol. LXXXVIII, 1905; 
" Poetry and Criticism of Swinburne," in Quarterly Review, Vol. CCIII, 
1905; More, in Shelburne Essays, 3d series (Putnam). 

Suggested Readings. "Atalanta in Calydon; " "The Last Oracle," 
"A Forsaken Garden," "By the North Sea," "Hertha," "The Hymn 
to Proserpine," "Itylus," "The Pilgrims." Essays: "Poems of Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti," "Byron," in Essays and Studies (Scribner). 

Alfred Tennyson. (Page 594.) Life and Complete Works, 10 vols. 
(Macmillan); Works (Globe Ed.); Works (Cambridge Ed.); In Memo- 
riam, Maud, and The Princess ("Temple Classics "); Select Poems, ed. by 
Rolfe (Houghton); Princess, ed. by Cook (Ginn); Idylls of the King, 
ed. by Rolfe (Houghton). 

Biography. Memoir by his Son (Macmillan); Waugh, Study of Life 
and Work (Macmillan); Lyall, Life (E. M. L.); Jennings, Biographical 
Sketch (Lippincott); Horton, Life (Dutton); Mrs. Ritchie, in Records of 
Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning (Harper). 

Criticism. Luce, Tennyson Primer ("Temple Primers"); Luce, Hand- 
book to the Works (Macmillan); Tennyson Primer, Dixon (Dodd); 
Chapman, Companion to "In Memoriam" (Macmillan); Gatty, Key to 
"In Memoriam" (Macmillan); Bradley, Commentary on "In Memo- 
riam " (Macmillan); Tainsh, Study of the Works (Macmillan); Bagehot, 
"Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning," in Literary Studies, Vol. II 
(Longmans); * Dowden, "Tennyson and Browning," in Studies in 
Literature, 1789-1877 (Scribner); Hutton, in Literary Essays (Mac- 
millan); Bayne, in Lessons from My Masters (Harper); Genung, 
Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (Houghton); Roden Noel, in Poetry 
and Poets (Kegan Paul); Swinburne, "Tennyson and Musset," in 
Miscellanies (Scribner); Robertson, "Art of Tennyson," in Essays 
Towards a Critical Method (London, 1889); H. Van Dyke, Poetry 
of Tennyson (Scribner); Dawson, in Makers of English Poetry (Re- 
vell); Brooke, Tennyson; His Art and His Relation to Modern Life 



STUDY LISTS. 697 

(Putnam); Saintsbury, in Corrected Impressio?is (Dodd); Trent, "Ten- 
nyson and Musset Once More," in Authority of Criticism (Scribner) ; 
F. Harrison, in Tennyson, Ruskin, and Mill (Macmillan); Dixon, 
Tennyson Primer, with a Critical Essay (Dodd), contains useful bibliog- 
raphy and list of dates ; * Masterman, Tennyson as a Religious Teacher 
(Knight and Millet); Littledale, Essays on Idylls of the King (Mac- 
millan); Maccallum, Tennyson's Idylls of the King (Macmillan); Alford, 
"Idylls of the King," in Contemporary Review, Vol. XIII, 1870; David- 
son, Prolegomena to "In Memoriam" (Heath). 

Suggested Readings. 1. Poems Illustrative of Tennyson's Art. 
"Claribel," "Nothing Will Die," "Lilian," two songs on "The Owl," 
"Madeline," "The Northern Farmer," (old and new style), "Boadicea," 
"The Charge of the Light Brigade," "The Revenge," "Tears, Idle 
Tears" and "The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls" (from "The Prin- 
cess"), "Frater ave atque vale." 

2. Tennyson's Theory of Art. "The Day Dream," "The Palace of 
Art," "The Flower," "The Poet," "The Poet's Mind," "Merlin and 
the Gleam." 

3. Tennyson as Poet of Nature: poems suggestive of particutar localities. 
"Mariana," "The Dying Swan," "The Brook," and the natural 
descriptions scattered throughout Tennyson's works. For interesting 
studies of this subject, see The Laureate's Country, by A. J. Church 
(Seeley); In Tennyson Land, by J. Cumming Walter (Redway), "Lin- 
colnshire Scenery and Characters as Illustrated by Mr. Tennyson," in 
Macmillan's Magazine, November and April, 1873-1874, Howitt's 
Homes and Haunts of the British Poets (Routledge). 

4. Classical Poems. "The Lotos-Eaters," "Ulysses " "Tithonus," 
"CEnone," "Demeter and Persephone." 

5. Arthurian Poems. "The Lady of Shalott," "Sir Galahad," 
"Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere," The Idylls of the King. (The 
following Idylls are suggested if the entire series is not read, "Dedica- 
tion," "The Coming of Arthur," "Gareth and Lynette," "The Holy 
Grail," "Guinevere," "The Passing of Arthur," "Epilogue"). 

6. Dramas. "Harold," "Becket." 

7. Tennyson as a Teacher, (a) Ideas of democracy and social reform, 
class distinctions as a bar to marriage, etc. "The Gardiner's Daughter, " 
"The Miller's Daughter," "Locksley Hall," "Aylmer's Field," "Lady 
Clara Vere de Vere," "The Beggar Maid," "Maud," "The Princess." 
(b) Political Poems. "You Ask Me Why tho' IU at Ease," "Of Old 
Sat Freedom on the Heights," "Love Thou Thy Land," and for 
Tennyson's youthful and maturer feeling toward contemporary prob- 
lems, "Locksley Hall" and "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After." (c) 
Religious and Philosophic Poems. "The Two Voices," In Memoriam, 
"Vastness," "The Higher Pantheism," "Despair," "The Ancient 
Sage," "By an Evolutionist," "Crossing the Bar." 

Robert Browning. (Page 610.) Poetical Works, 12 vols., ed. 



698 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

with introduction and notes by Porter and Clarke (Crowell); 
Poetical Works, ed. by Birrell (Globe Ed.); Poetical Works (Cambridge 
Ed.); Selections, ed. by Garnett (Endymion Series, Macmillan); 
Selections, ed. by Rylands (Bell's Miniature Series, Macmillan); 
Dramatic Monologues, Men and Women, Paracelsus, Sordello, Pippa 
Passes (" Temple Classics "); Lyrical and Dramatic Poems, ed. by Mason 
(Holt); Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 
2 vols. (Harper). 

Biography. Mrs. Orr, Life and Letters (Houghton); * Sharp, Life 
(G. W. S.); Dowden, Life (Dutton); Mrs. Ritchie, in Tennyson, Ruskin, 
Browning (Harper) ; Cary, Browning, Poet and Man (Putnam); Marzials, 
Life (Macmillan); Waugh, Life (Westminster Biographies) (Small, 
Maynard). 

Criticism. Mrs. Orr, Handbook to the Works, 3d edition (Mac- 
millan); * Cooke, Guidebook to Browning (Houghton); Berdoe, Brown- 
ing Cyclopaedia (Macmillan); Alexander, Introduction to Poetry of 
Browning (Ginn); Corson, Introduction to the Study of Browning's 
Poetry (Heath) ; * Symons, Introduction to the Study of Browning 
(Cassell); Fotheringham, Studies of Mind and Art of Browning (Scribner) ; 
Berdoe, Browning's Message to His Time (Sonnenschein); Nettleship, 
Robert Browning: Essays (Matthews); Re veil, Browning's Criticism 
of Life (Sonnenschein); Gosse, Personalia (Houghton); Bagehot, 
"Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning," in Literary Studies, Vol. II 
(Longmans); * Dowden, (a) "Tennyson and Browning," in Studies in 
Literature, 1789-1877 (Scribner); (5) "Sordello," in Transcripts and 
Studies (Scribner); Hutton, in Literary Essays, 3d edition (Mac- 
millan); Birrell, "On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning's Poetry," 
in Obiter Dicta, 1st series (Scribner); Roden Noel, in Poetry and 
Poets (Kegan Paul); Jacobs, in Literary Studies (Scribner); H. Jones, 
Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher (Macmillan) ; Dawson, 
in Makers of English Poetry (Re veil); Saintsbury, in Corrected 
Impressions (Dodd); Scudder, "Browning as a Humorist," in Life 
of the Spirit in Modern English Poets (Houghton); Chapman, in 
Emerson and Other Essays (Scribner); Stedman, in Victorian Poets 
(Houghton); Cooke, in Poets and Problems (Houghton). 

Suggested Readings. 1. Love Poems: "Evelyn Hope," "By the 
Fireside," "One Word More," "The Last Ride Together," "Love 
Among the Ruins." 2. Narrative: "Martin Relph," "Muleykeh," 
"Ivan Ivanovitch," "The Flight of the Duchess," "Clive." 3. Art 
Poems: "My Last Duchess," "Andrea del Sarto," "Fra Lippo Lippi," 
"Pictor Ignotus," "Old Pictures in Florence," "A Toccata of Gal- 
luppi's," "Master Hughes of Saxe-Gotha," "Abt Vogler." 4. Dramas: 
"In a Balcony," "Pippa Passes," "Luria," "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," 
"Paracelsus." 5. Immortality and Religion: "Rabbi Ben Ezra," 
"Epistle of Karshish," "Cleon," "Prospice," "Saul," "A Death in 
the Desert," "Christmas Eve," and "Easter Day," "Rephan." 6. 
Linger Poems: "The Ring and the Book." 



STUDY LISTS. 699 

The New Era 

(Pages 628-645) 

I. HISTORY. For Victorian and 20th century England, Cam- 
bridge Modern History, vol. XII, chaps. I, III, XX, XXIII, and XXIV; 
A. L. Cross, History of England and Greater Britain (Macmillan, 1914); 
* Hazen, Europe since 1815 (Holt, 1910), especially (for growth of 
British Empire) chaps. XXII and XXIII. 

II. LITERARY HISTORY AND CRITICISM. Walker, Litera- 
ture of the Victorian Era (Cambridge Press, 1910); Kennedy, English 
Literature 1880-1905 (Small, Maynard, 1913); Mair, English Litera- 
ture: Modern (Holt, 1911). For living, or recent, authors (including 
bibliography) The New International Encyclopedia (Dodd, Mead, 1916) 
will be found particularly helpful; see also, the English Who's Who, 
and Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. 

III. ANTHOLOGIES. * Miles, Robert Bridges and Contemporary 
Poets (Dutton, 1906), excellent selections, with brief biography and 
criticism; Couch, Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Clarendon Press, 
1912);' Brooke and Rolleston, A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English 
Tongue (Macmillan, 1900) includes historical introduction, biographies 
and criticism; * A. P. Graves, The Book of Irish Poetry (Stokes). 

William F. De Morgan. (Page 630.) Criticism. Phelps, Essays 
on Modern Novelists (Macmillan); Cooper, Some English Story-Tellers 
(Holt). 

Suggested Readings. Joseph Vance, Somehow Good, Alice-for- 
Short. 

Archibald Marshall. (Page 630.) Criticism. "An English Social 
Novelist," in The Outlook, vol. 108, p. 390; Bookman, vol. 27, p. 14. 

Suggested Readings. Exton Manor, The Squire's Daughter, The 
Eldest Son, The Honour of the Clintons. 

William Watson. (Page 630.) Criticism. R. Le Gallienne, in 
Attitudes and Avowals (Lane); * G. K. Chesterton, "Political Poetry 
of William Watson," in Fortnightly Rev., vol. 80, p. 761; Archer, in 
Poets of the Younger Generation (Lane); J. C. Collins, in Studies in 
Poetry and Criticism (Macmillan); G. Woodberry, Century Mag., vol. 
64, p. 801. 

Suggested Readings. Poetry: "To Edward Dowden," "Apolo- 
gia," "The First Skylark of Spring," "Wordsworth's Grave," "Lach- 
rymae Musarum," "Shelley's Centenary," Epigrams, The Year of 
Shame (Sonnets on the Armenian Massacres, 1896), "The Orgy on 
Parnassus," "To the Invincible Republic," "Hymn to the Sea." 
Prose: "Dr. ohnson on Modern Poetry," in Excursions in Criticism 
(Elkin, Matthews), Pencraft, A Plea for the Older Ways (Lane). 

Stephen Phillips. (Page 631.) Criticism. Archer, Poets of the 
Younger Generation; Hale, Dramatists of To-day (Holt); A. Symons, 
in Studies in Prose and Verse (Dent). 



700 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Suggested Readings. "Marpessa," "Endymion," "Christ in 
Hades," "Lyrics" (in Poems, 1891). Plays: Paolo and Francesco, 
The Sin of David. 

Alfred Noyes. (Page 631.) Criticism. Brian Hooker, Century 
Mag., vol. 66 (N. S.), p. 349; Gilbert Thomas, Living Age, vol. 285, 
p. 742. 

Suggested Readings. "The Loom of Years," "The Barrel Organ," 
"The Origin of Life," "Forty Singing Seamen," "The Empire Build- 
ers," "The Highwayman," "In the Cool of the Evening," "Rank 
and File." In The Lord of Misrule, etc. "The Searchlights," "Blind 
Moone of London." In A Belgian Christmas Eve, "Dedication," 
"Enceladus." 

Oscar Wilde. (Page 632.) Criticism. Ransome, Oscar Wilde, A 
Critical Study (Kennerley); Harris in Contemporary Portraits (Me- 
thuen); Henderson in European Dramatists (Stewart); Montague, 
"Oscar Wilde's Comedies," in Dramatic Values (Macmillan). 

Suggested Readings. "A Garden of Eros," "Ave Imperatrix," 
"The Ballad of Reading Goal." Plays: Lady Windermere's Fan. 

Rudyard Kipling. (Page 634.) Criticism. Archer, in Poets of 
the Younger Generation; Le Gallic nne, Rudyard Kipling (Lane); Hop- 
kins, Rudyard Kipling (Stokes); Cooper, in Some English Story- 
Tellers. 

Suggested Readings. Poetry: "A Song of the English," "The 
Last Chanty," "McAndrew's Hymn," "The 'Eathen," "L'Envoi," 
"The White Man's Burden," "The Islanders," "Boots," "Reces- 
sional," "Fuzzy Wuzzy," "Danny Deever," "Mandalay," "Tomlin- 
son," "The Battle .of the Bolivar," "Ballad of East and West," "The 
English Flag." Prose: Kim; in Mine Own People, "Without Benefit 
of Clergy," "The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney," "The Man 
Who Was;" in The Phantom Rickshaw. "The Man Who Would be 
King," "The Strange Ride of Morrobie Jukes;" in The Day's Work, 
"William the Conqueror." 

Henry John Newbolt. (Page 635.) Criticism. Archer, in Poets 
of the Younger Generation. 

Suggested Readings. Poetry: Admirals All, "He Fell Among 
Thieves," "Craven," "Ionicus," "Clifton Chapel," "Vital Lampada," 
"The Vigil," "The Only Son," "Hope the Hornblower," "Epistle to 
Col. Younghusband," "Commemoration," "The School at War." 
Prose: Newbolt's novel The Twymans contains some interesting de- 
scriptions of Clifton, his old school, mentioned so often in his poems. 

W. E. Henley. (Page 636.) Biography and Criticism. Corn- 
ford, William Ernest Henley (Constable); Low, "William Ernest 
Henley," in Cornhill Mag., vol. 15, p. 411; Symons, "Mr. Henley's 
Poetry," in Fortnightly Rev., vol. 58, p. 182; Blackburn, in Fortnightly 
Rev., vol. 80, p. 232. 

Suggested Readings. In "Bric-a-Brac," "Croquis," "What is 
to come we know not;" in "Echoes," III, IV, XIX, XXXV, XXXVIII. 



STUDY LISTS. 701 

In "London Voluntaries," I and III; in "Rhymes and Rhythms," 
XVIII and XXV; "Epilogue." 

John Davidson. (Page 637.) Criticism. Archer, in Poets of the 
Younger Generation; Mories, "The Religious Significance of John 
Davidson," in Westminster Rev., vol. 180, p. 75; Young, "The New 
Poetry," in Fortnightly Rev., vol. 91, p. 136; Harris, in Contemporary 
Portraits. 

Suggested Readings. All the following selections are given in 
Selected Poems (Lane); "A Ballad in Blank Verse of the Making of a 
Poet" (apparently partly autobiographical), "Song of a Train," "A 
Loafer," "Thirty Bob a Week," "In Romney Marsh," "London," 
"Waiting," "Piper, Play!" In Fleet Street and Other Poems, "Fleet 
Street," "Railway Stations;" in Ballads and Songs, "Spring," 
"Summer," "Autumn;" in New Ballads, "A Northern Suburb," 
"A Highway Pimpernel." 

W. W. Gibson. (Page 638.) Criticism. Sturgeon, in Studies of 
Contemporary Poets (Dodd, Mead). Suggested Readings. Daily 
Bread (Macmillan); Fires (Macmillan). 

John Masefield. (Page 638.) Criticism. Montague, "Mr. Mase- 
field's Tragedies," in Dramatic Values; Sturgeon, in Studies of Contem- 
porary Poets; Weygandt, "Plays and Poetry of John Masefield," in 
Univ. of Pa. University Lectures, 1913-14; Scudder, "Masefield and 
Gibson," in The Survey, vol. 21, p. 707; Thomas, "Masefield's Poetry," 
in Fortnightly Rev., vol. 99, p. 1154. 

Suggested Readings. In Salt Water Ballads, "A Consecration," 
"Bill," "Sea Fever," "A Wanderer's Song," "A Ballad of Cape St. 
Vincent," "Vagabond," "Personal;" in Ballads and Poems, "Car- 
goes," "An Old Song Re-Sung," "London Town," "The Seekers," 
"Twilight." The Everlasting Mercy. In The Story of a Round House 
and Other Poems, "Dauber," "Ships;" in Philip the King, "August, 
1914." 

G. R. Gissing. (Page 639.) Criticism. * P. E. More, "George 
Gissing," in Shelburne Essays, 5th Series; * T. Seccombe, introductory 
"Survey" prefixed to Gissing's House of Cobwebs (Constable). 

Suggested Readings. The Nether World; New Grub Street; The 
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft; Charles Dickens, A Critical 
Study. 

John Galsworthy. (Page 639.) Criticism. Cooper, in Some 
English Story-Tellers; A. R. Skemp, on "Plays of John Galsworthy," 
in English Ass'n Essays and Studies, vol. 4. (Oxford Press); Howe, 
in Dramatic Portraits (Seeker). 

Suggested Readings. Novels: The Patrician; The Man of Prop- 
erty; Fraternity; The Freelands. Plays: The Silver Box; Joy; Strife; 
Justice. 

G. B. Shaw. (Page 639.) Biography and Criticism. Hender- 
son, George Bernard Shaw; His Life and Works (Lane); and in Euro- 
pean Dramatists (Stewart); Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (Lane), 



702 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

and in Heretics] Hunneker, "Quintessence of Shaw," in Iconoclasts 
(Scribner); Montague, in Dramatic Values; McCabe, George Bernard 
Shaw (Paul); Howe, Bernard Shaw (Dodd, Mead); Burton, Bernard 
Shaw, The Man and the Mask (Holt). 

Suggested Readings. Novels: Cashel Byron's Profession. Plays: 
"Arms and the Man," "Candida," "You Never Can Tell"; — all in 
Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," 
"Man and Superman," "John Bull's Other Island," "The Showing-up 
of Blanco Posnet." 

H. G. "Wells. (Page 640.) Biography and Criticism. Slosson, 
in Six Major Prophets (Little, Brown); Chesterton, "Mr. H. G. Wells 
and the Giants," in Heretics; Van W. Brooks, World of H. G. Wells 
(Kennerley) . 

Suggested Readings. Tono Bungay, The World Set Free, The 
Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, Bealby, Mr. Britling Sees it Through. 

"Celtic Renaissance." (Page 641.) Renan, Poetry of The Celtic 
Races (first pub. 1859), translated with Introduction (Walter Scott 
Pub. Co.); Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, first pub. 1867 
(Macmillan); Boyd, Ireland's Literary Renaissance (Lane); Morris, 
The Celtic Dawn (Macmillan); Weygandt, Irish Plays and Playwrights 
(Houghton, Mifflin); Kraus, W. B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival 
(McClure); MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland (Stokes). Collections 
illustrating Irish Literature; Sigerson, Bards of the Gael and Gall 
(Unwin); E. Hull, The Poem Booh of the Gael (Chatto and Windus); 
W. B. Yeats, Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. See also references in 1. 
Celtic Literature, p. 659, supra. 

W. B. Yeats. , (Page 642.) Biography and Criticism. Reid, 
W. B. Yeats, A Critical Study (Dodd, Mead); Archer, in Poets of the 
Younger Generation; Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse; see also 
references under "Celtic Renaissance," p. 641, supra. 

Suggested Readings. Poetry: "The Wanderings of Oisin," "To 
the Rose Upon the Rood of Time," "The Lake Isle of Inisfree," "The 
Ballad of Father Gilhgan," "To Ireland in the Coming Tunes," "The 
Hosting of the Sidhe," "The Fiddler of Dooney." Plays: "Kathleen 
ni Hoolihan," "The Countess Kathleen," "The Land of Heart's De- 
sire," "The Shadowy Waters," "Deirdre." Prose: The Celtic Twi- 
light. 

J. M. Synge. (Page 644.) Biography and Criticism. W. B. 
Yeats, J. M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time (Kennerley); J. Mase- 
field, John M. Synge (Macmillan) ; * Bickley, Synge and the Irish 
Dramatic Movement (Houghton, Miffiin); Home, J. M. Synge, A 
Critical Study (Seeker); Montague, in Dramatic Values; see also ref- 
erences under "Celtic Renaissance," p. 641, supra. 

Suggested Readings. Plays: "Riders to the Sea," "The Well of 
the Saints," "The Playboy of the Western World." Poetry: "The 
Passing of the Shee," "After looking at one of A. E.'s pictures." Prose : 
The Aran Islands, 



STUDY LISTS, 703 

Francis Thompson. (Page 644.) Biography and Criticism. 
Life by E. Meynell (Burns); P., E. More, in, Shdburne Essays, 7th 
Series (Putnam); Archer, in Poets of the Younger Generation. 

Suggested Readings. Poetry: "The Hoimd of Heaven," "A 
Fallen Yew," "A Corymbus for Autumn," "To the Dead Cardinal of 
Westminster," "The Mistress of Vision," "Daisy," "The Kingdom of 
God." 

G. K. Chesterton. (Page 645.) Criticism. West, G. K. Chester- 
ton, A Critical Study (Dodd, Mead); Slosson, in Six Major Prophets; 
Ward, "Mr. Chesterton Among the Prophets," in Men and Matters 
(Longmans, Green). 

Suggested Readings. Poems: "To E. C. Bentley" (Dedication 
of The Man Who Was Thursday), "To Hillaire Belloc" (Dedication 
of The Napoleon of Notling Hill); "The Wife of Flanders," "The 
Great Minimum," "The House of Christmas," "A Hymn," "The 
Higher Unity," "A Ballad of Suicide," * The Ballad of the White Horse. 
Prose: Heretics, Orthodoxy, The Man Who Was Thursday, Charles 
Dickens, A Critical Study. 



INDEX. 



(Small Capitals denote important cross-references.) 



Abbeys, old English, 48, 53n., 77, 
96, 110. 

Accent a characteristic feature of 
early English versification, 96. 

Acting, early, 227. 

Addison, Joseph, 8, 323, 351; 
early years, 351; Steele and, 
351, 353, 356; The Campaign, 
352; writes for the Tatler, 
353; Spectator, 348, 353; the 
periodical essays, 353; town 
and country in the De Coverley 
Papers, 354, 361, 396rc.; other 
essays, 354; Addison and the 
reading public, 354; Cato, 355; 
last years, 355; character and 
works, 355, 625. 

Adrian, or Hadrian (monk), 47, 
48, 57, 67. 

iElfric, 70; educational and mon- 
astic reformer, 70 ; Homilies, 70; 
Lives of the Saints, 70. 

iEstheticism in literature: see 
Ruskin; Rossetti; Morris; 
Wilde. 

iEthelwold, 70. 

Africa, 633; literature of, 634, 635. 

Age of Chaucer, 104; chivalry, 
105; Chaucer's England, 106; 
the new order, 107; the rise of 
the people, 107; the Black 
Death, 108; the new democracy, 
109; religion, 110; the new 
learning, 111; literature in the 
north, 112; Richard Rolle of 
Hampole, 113; Lawrence Minot, 
116; romance, 116; Cleanness, 
Patience, and the Pearl, 118; 
London becomes literary centre, 
120; rise of English prose, 121; 
Wyclif, 122; other prose writers, 



123; William Langland, 125; 
Geoffrey Chaucer, 132. 

Age of Elizabeth: see Elizabeth; 
English Renaissance. 

Age of Pope, the, 322; Dry den's 
successors continue his work, 
322; Pope and the heroic 
couplet, 323; merits and limi- 
tations of the prevailing style, 
324; the literature of "the 
town," 324; the London of 
Pope, 324; brutality and coarse- 
ness of the Augustan Age, 
325; Alexander Pope, 326; 
some minor poets of Pope's 
time, 326; authorship of the 
Augustan Age and the rise of 
the new prose, 340; effect on 
authorship of the Revolution 
of 1688, 341; growth of the 
reading public, 342; freedom of 
the press (1695), 342; the 
coffee-houses, 343; rise of the 
new prose, 343; Sir Richard 
'Steele, 344; Joseph Addison, 
351; history of the novel, 357; 
Daniel Defoe, 363; Jonathan 
Swift, 372; other prose writers 
of the eighteenth century, 380; 
Richardson and Fielding, 387. 

Age of Victoria: see Victorian 
England. 

Aidan, 46, 60. 

Ainsworth, W. Harrison, 557. 

Alcuin, 62, 70. 

Aldhelm, 35, 48; best English 
poet of his time, 58; poetry of 
the people, 59. 

Alfred, 35; treaty with the Danes, 
63; revival of learning, 64; on 
education, 65; his translations, 



705 



706 



INDEX. 



66; author as well as translator, 
66; his patriotism not provin- 
cial, 66; "founder of English 
prose," 67; a very good and 
a very great man, 68; English 
Chronicle, 68; elevation of 
English prose, 69; from Alfred 
to the Norman Conquest, 69. 

Alliteration, early basis of Eng- 
lish verse, 13, 120, 121; in 
Anglo-Saxon poetry, 57; aban- 
doned for the French fashion 
of rhyme, 96. 

Angles (or Engles), the, 16, 45. 

Anglo-Norman literature, sum- 
mary of, 83; Havelock the Dane, 
83, 88; Bevis of Hampton, 88; 
Guy of Warwick, 88; Owl and 
Nightingale, 88; Land of Cock- 
aigne, 88. 

Anglo-Saxon verse, 56, 57 (see 
also Beowulf) . 

Annals, 68. 

Anne, Queen, 324, 341; alliance 
of literature and politics, 341; 
characteristics of literature dur- 
ing her reign, 400. 

Anselm, St., 74, 75. 

Arbuthnot, Dr. John, Physician 
extraordinary to the Queen, 
381; Pope's Epistle to, 324, 
381; Dr. Johnson on, 381; 
Swift on, 381; Memoirs of 
Martin Scriblerus, 381; History 
of John Bull, 381. 

Architecture, early English eccle- 
siastical, 48. 

Arden, forest of, 230, 359. 

Arden, Mary, mother of Shake- 
speare, 230. 

Arnold, Matthew, as poet, 553; 
uncertainty and unbelief, 554, 
593; Tristram and Iseult, 555; 
as critic, 555; his style, 555-; 
Culture and Anarchy, 556; St. 
Paul and Protestantism, 556; 
Switzerland, 559; on Words- 
worth, 459; on Keats, 514n.; 
on the England of to-day, 524, 
625, 629, 631, 634, 635. 

Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 627. 

Arthur and his knights, stories 
about, hold high place in 



national literature of England, 
29; epic of, 78, 79, 81. 

xlryan race, table of, 16w. 

Ascham, Roger, 186, 188; Tox- 
ophilus, 187, 188, 255; The 
Schoolmaster, 188. 

Asser, Alfred's biographer, 65. 

Athelstane, 70. 

Atterbury, Francis, 386; on Ber- 
keley, 386. 

Augustan Age, the, 8, 325; 
authorship in, 340; compared 
to Golden Age of Latin litera- 
ture, 342; growth of the read- 
ing public, 342; freedom of 
the press (1695), 342; the coffee- 
houses, 343; rise of the new 
prose, 343. (See also Age of 
Pope; Authorship.) 

Augustine, St., 46, 48. 

Austen, Jane, 392, 557; Sense and 
Sensibility, 557. 

Australia, literature of, 634, 635. 

Authorship in the Augustan Age, 
340; rise of the new prose, 340; 
change in the position of the 
author, 340; effect on author- 
ship of the Revolution of 1688, 
341. 

Avon, river, 230. 

Bacon, Francis, 246; life, 250; 
Advancement of Learning, 251; 
Essays, 251, 252, 253; History 
of Henry VII., 251; New Atlan- 
tis, 251; History of the World, 
251; his life a tragic contradic- 
tion, 253, 625. 

Baducing (Benedict Biscop), 48, 
59, 60, 61. 

Bseda: see Bede. 

Ball, John, "the mad Priest of 
Kent," 109. 

Ballads, old, 89, 92, 165; Song to 
Alysoun, 89; Edom o' Gordon, 
166; Clerk Saunders, 167; Twa 
Corbies, 167; Sir Patrick Spens, 
167, The Nut-Brown Maid, 167; 
wide-spread influence of, 419, 
420. 

Barbour, John, 159; Bruce (poem). 
159. 

Bard, the Celtic, 27. 



INDEX. 



707 



Barri, Gerald de, 79. 

Bastile, destruction of the, and 
English literature, 450. 

Beattie. James, 413; Minstrel, 
413, 415. 

Beaumont, Francis, 262 (see also 
Beaumont and Fletcher). 

Beaumont and Fletcher, "twin 
brethren of the stage," 266; 
Faithful Shepherdess, 266, 280; 
•their work shows decadence of 
the drama, 266. 

Becket, St. Thomas a, 106, 109. 

Beckford, William, 408; Vathek, 
408. 

Bede, 35, 44, 47;. his monastic 
life, 60; his work as writer, 61; 
De Natura Rerum, 61; his trans- 
lation of the Gospel of St. John, 
61; as teacher, 62; his charac- 
ter, 62; his Ecclesiastical History , 
61; translated by Alfred, 66, 
67. 

Bennett, Arnold, 640. 

Belloc, Hillaire, 645. 

Beowulf, 19, 37; chief among rel- 
ics of Anglo-Saxon poetry, 37; 
origin of, 37; relation to other 
Teutonic poems, 38; story of the 
poem, 39; its spirit, 41; essen- 
tially heathen, 43. 

Berkeley, Bishop, 385; Hylos and 
Philonous, 386; Alciphron, 386; 
quotation from, 386. 

Berners, Lord, translator of 
Froissart, 187. 

Besant, Walter, 519; All Sorts and 
Conditions of Men, 519. 

Bible, its incalculable influence 
on prose literature, 123, 188; 
Wyclif, 123, 259; Tyndale, 188, 
259; Coverdale, 255; King 
James, 302. 

Biscop, Benedict, 48, 59, 60, 61. 

Black Death, the, 108. 

Blackmore, R. D., 575; Lorna 
Doonc, 575, 625. 

Blackstone, Sir William, 403; 
Commentaries, 403. 

Blair, Robert, 400; Grave, 400. 

Blake, William, 416; Edward III., 
417. 

Boer War, 631, 633. 



Bolingbroke, Lord, 375, 376, 382; 
friend of Pope, 382; his fall, 383; 
contrasted with Swift, 383; 
Reflections upon Exile, 383; 
Letters to Sir William Wyndham, 
384; Idea of a Patriot King, 384; 
Letters on the Study of History, 
384; noted for style, 384. 

Britons, the, 23, 45. 

Bronte sisters, the, 574; Jane 
Eyre (Charlotte), 574; Wuther- 
ing Heights (Emily), 574. 

Brooke, Henry, 401; The Univer- 
sal Beauty, 401. 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 291, 340; 
Enquiries into Vulgar and Com- 
mon Errors, 292; Religio Medici, 
292; Urn Burial, 293. 

Browne, William, 268; Britannia's 
Pastorals, 270. 

Browning, Mrs., 525; Prometheus 
Bound, 525; sonnets, 612. 

Browning, Robert, 525; Pauline, 
525, 610; his genial and virile 
personality, 611; Landor on, 
611; Pippa Passes, 611; wide 
sympathies with man and 
Nature, 612; Mrs. Browning, 
612; One Word More, by the 
Fireside, The Ring and the 
Book, 613, 621; his unfalter- 
ing cheerfulness, 613; life in 
Florence, 613; Pauline, 613; 
Asolando, his last poem, 613, 
621; as artist, 613; Red Cotton 
Nightcap Country, 614; Old 
Pictures in Florence, 614; 
Pacchiarotto, 614; occasional 
obscurity, 614; his theory of 
art, 615; his poetic merit, 615; 
Martin Ralph, Ivan Ivanovitch, 
616; Christmas Eve, 616; 
supreme in dramatic mono- 
logue, 616; My Last Duchess, 
Andrea del Sarto. Fra Lippo 
Lippi, 617; Master Hugues of 
Saxe-Gotha, 617; as a teacher, 
618; his spiritual view of life, 
619; his dramatic power of 
another order from that of the 
Elizabethans, 620; summary of 
his work, 621, 625, 626, 627, 
628, 629. 



708 



INDEX. 



Bryce, James, 552; The American 
Commonwealth, 552. 

Brythons (Britons), 23. (See also 
Celts.) 

Buckhurst, Lord, 184. 

Bulwer, Edward, Lord Lytton, 
557; Last Days of Pompeii, 557; 
The Caxtons, 557; My Novel. 
557, 641. 

Bunyan, John, 295; child of the 
Reformation, 295; life, 296; 
Grace Abounding to the Chief of 
Sinners, 297; The Pilgrim's 
Progress, 296, 299, 308; Life and 
Death of Mr. Badman, 299; 
The Holy War, 299, 308; his 
style, 302; contrasted with 
Dry den, 303. 

Burke, Edmund, 429, 451; and 
Goldsmith, 429; life, 430; career 
as author, 430; Vindication of 
Natural Society, 430; Philo- 
sophical Inquiry into the Origin 
of our Ideas of the Sublime and 
Beautiful, 430; literature and 
politics, 431; Annual Register, 
431; speech on the repeal of the 
Stamp Act, 431; Thoughts on 
the Present Discontents, 432, 435 ; 
speeches on America, 432; trial 
of Hastings, 432; his conserva- 
tism, 433; Reflections on the 
Revolution in France, 433; 
death of his son, 434; Letters on 
a Regicide Peace, 434; his death, 
434; as a man of letters, 434; 
as political thinker, 435. 

Burney, Frances, 562; Evelina, 
562. 

Burns, Robert, 9, 444; general 
criticism, 444; Carlyle on, 445; 
on poetry, 445; life, 447; one of 
the great song- writers of the 
world, 447; love-songs, 448; 
The Cotter's Saturday Night, 
410, 448; poet of Nature as well as 
of man, 449; and Scott, 470, 637. 

Burton, Robert, 291; Anatomy of 
Melancholy, 291. 

Butler, Bishop, 394; Analogy of 
Religion, 394. 

Butler, Samuel, 306; Hudibras, 
306. 



Byron, Lord, 9, 399, 491; and 
Scott, 473; most truly repre- 
sentative poet of his time, 491; 
life, 491; Hours of Idleness, 492; 
English Bards and Scotch 
Reviewers, 492; Childe Harold, 
399, 473, 492, 493; eclipses 
Scott as a poet, 493; The Giaour, 
493; his marriage, 493; Cain, 
Manfred, Don Juan, 493, 497; 
espouses cause of the Greeks, 
493; death, 494; his work, 494; 
Vision of Judgment, 495; his 
egotism, 495; devotion to 
liberty, 496; Bride of Abydos, 
496; what his poetry lacks, 497; 
Carlyle on, 497. 

Csedmon, 49; founds school of 
religious verse, 50, 60; Caed- 
monian cycle, 50; Creation the 
first words of English literature 
on English soil, 50; poems, 
51-54; Biblical Paraphrases, 52; 
Exodus, 52; Phamix, 53; Dream 
of the Rood, 53; Guthlac, 53; 
"Father of English Poetry," 59. 

Cambrensis, Geraldus (Gerald de 
Barri), 79; Itinerarium Cam- 
brian, 79. 

Campbell, Thomas, 490. 

Canada, literature in, 635. 

Canterbury Tales, the, 111; synop- 
sis, 142; Prologue, 142; KnighVs 
Tale, 146; Clerk's Tale, 147; 
Man of Lawe's Tale, 147, 148; 
Pardoner's Tale, 152. 

Carew, Thomas, 267, 275. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 10, 452, 529; on 
Burns, 445; on Coleridge, 459; 
on Scott, 476; on Byron, 497; 
on popular education, 521; con- 
trasted with Macaulay, 529; 
his rugged personality, 530; life, 
531; settles in Edinburgh, 532; 
contributes to various periodi- 
cals, 533, 534; under the spell of 
Goethe, 533; translates Goethe's 
Wilhelm Meister, 534; Life of 
Schiller, 534; Specimens of Ger- 
man Romance, 534; marries 
Jane Welsh, 534; Sartor Resar- 
tus, 531, 533, 534; criticism of 



INDEX. 



709 



the book, 534; settles in London, 
535; beginning of his popu- 
larity, 536; French Revolution, 
536, 538, 539; Life of Frederick 
the Great, 536, 538; becomes 
Lord Rector of the University of 
Edinburgh, 536; death of his 
wife, 536; Reminiscences, 536; 
his death, 536; estimate of his 
work, 536; his theory of history, 
538; Cromwell, 538; his style, 
539; descriptive power, 540; 
humour and tenderness, 540; 
a spiritual force, 541; his work 
associated with that of John 
Ruskin, 541; 625, 626, 628. 

Cavalier poets, 267, 275. 

Cavendish, George, 187; biog- 
raphy of Cardinal Wolsey, 187. 

Caxton, William, first English 
printer, 176. 

Celtic Revival, the, 641, 642, 644. 

Celts, the, 14, 24; story of Sa- 
brina, 14; their love of colour, 
25; love of nature, 26; senti- 
ment, 27; literature, 27; in- 
fluence upon the English, 28; 
upon English literature, 14, 77; 
Christianity, 47; Celtic culture 
in Northumbria, 57. 

Chambers, William and Robert, 
521. 

Chancery, Courts of, 639. 

Chanson, Norman-French, 37. 

Chapman, Ins translation of 
Homer, 189. 

Chapman, George, 262. 

Charlemagne, culture of Middle 
Ages based on schools of, 62. 

Charter, the Great, 85. 

Chatterton, Thomas, 419. 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5, 11, 83, 101- 
3; stories of Arthur, 78; "new 
learning." Ill; life, 134; page 
to Countess of Ulster, 134; 
student, 135; in the French 
war (1353), 137; Romance of the 
Rose, 137; early poems, 137; 
Compleynte to Pitie, 138; Dethe 
of Blaunche the Duchesse, 138; 
marriage, 138; first visit to 
Italy (1372), 138; return to 
England, 139; House of Fame, 



Troilus and Cressida, and other 
poems, 140; becomes poor 
(1386), 140; Ballad of Good 
Counseil or Truth, 141; the 
Canterbury Tales, 142; last 
years, 149; his work, 149; Com- 
plaint of his Empty Purse, 149; 
Chaucer and the Renaissance, 
151; as poet, 151; poet of the 
Court, 153; in Scotland, 159, 
627. (See also Age of Chau- 
cer.) 

Chesterton, G. K., 629, 645. 

Chevy Chase, 92. 

Chivalry, 105, 107. 

Christianity, Celtic, 47; Roman, 
47; and literature, 57. 

Chronicle, the English, 68, 69; the 
Latin, 76. 

Chrysoloras, Manuel, 171. 

Church, Christian influence of, 
upon English literature, 5; and 
culture, 46; founding of monas- 
teries and schools in England, 
48; parent of earliest native 
English literature, 49. 

Church of England, early in the 
eighteenth century, 395. 

Clanvowe, Sir Thomas, 157; The 
Cuckoo and the Nightingale, 157. 

Clarendon, Lord, 293; History of 
the Great Rebellion, 293. 

Clarke, Marcus, 635. 

Classical School, 405, 407; reac- 
tion from the restrictions of the, 
408. 

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 59?. 

Cobbett, William, 520; Weekly 
Register, 520. 

"Cockney School," the, 508. 

Coffee-houses, London, 343, 404. 

Coleridge, Samuel T., 398, 451, 
459; and Wordsworth, 459, 461; 
Carlyle on, 459, 461; absence of 
imity and steady purpose, 460; 
meets Southey, 460; the Panti- 
socracy, 460; marriage, 461; 
The Ancient Mariner, 398, 461, 
466; in Germany, 461; trans- 
lates Wallenstein, 461; victim 
of opium, 461; Youth and Age, 
462; death, 463; his work, 464; 
as philosopher and critic, 464; 



710 



INDEX. 



Biographia Liter aria, 464; as 
poet, 464; Kubla Khan, 465; 
criticism, 465; Christabel, 466; 
moral significance of The Ancient 
Mariner, 467; a poet of man, 
469; France, 469. 

Colet, John, 175, 177, 178, 255; 
infuses new life into the inter- 
pretation of the Bible, 178. 

Collier, Jeremy, Immorality and 
Profaneness of the Stage, 315. 

Collins, William, 407, 416; Per- 
sian Eclogues, 407; Odes, 412, 
415; Dr. Johnson on, 412; Ode 
on the Popular Superstitions of 
the Highlands of Scotland, 413; 
Ode to Evening, 413, 416. 

Collins, William Wilkie, 573; his 
works noted for elaboration of 
plot, 573; Vioman in White, 
Armadale, Moonstone, 574. 

Colonies, 633; literature of, 635. 

Columbus, Christopher, 180. 

Congreve, William, 321; Love for 
Love, 321; The Way of the 
World, 321; The Mourning 
Bride, 321. 

Conrad, Joseph, 635. 

Coverdale, 255; his Bible, 255. 

Cowley, Abraham, 272. 

Cowper, William, .436; life, 437; 
contributes to the Connoisseur, 
438; for a time insane, 439; 
lives with the Unwins, 439; 
perhaps the most representa- 
tive poet of his generation, 440; 
The Task, 440, 450; early works, 
441; The Castaway, 443; Lines 
on My Mother's Picture, 443; 
On the Loss of the Royal George, 
444; his letters, 444. 

Crabbe, George, 413; The Village, 
414, 638. 

Craik, George L., 521. 

Cranmer, Bishop, his Prayer Book, 
188; his Bible, 255. 

Crashaw, Richard, 273. 

Creighton, Mandell, 552. 

Cuckoo Song, 90. 

Cursor Mundi, 112. 

Cynewulf, 54; religious poems 
attributed to him, 54; his 
Christ, 53, 54, 55; Andreas, 52, 



54; Elene, 54; Juliana, 54; Fates 
of the Apostles, 54; Judith, 53, 54; 
Riddles, 54. 

Daily C our ant, 347. 

Danes, 2, 4, 17; invade North- 
umbria, 63; sack and burn 
monasteries, 63; overrun great 
part of England, 63; checked by 
Alfred, 63; Peace of Chippen- 
ham, 63; tract ceded to, 63, 69. 

Daniel, Samuel, 221; Civil Wars, 
221 

Darwin, Charles, 10, 524, 625, 628. 

Darwin, Erasmus, 401; Botanic 
Garden, 401. 

Davidson, John, 629, 636, 637; 
Fleet Street Eclogues, 638, 640. 

Day, Thomas, 406. 

Death, the Black, 108. 

Defoe, Daniel, 347, 357, 363; his 
busy and stirring career, 363; 
early years, 364; pamphleteer, 
365; The True-born English- 
man, 365; The Shortest Way 
with Dissenters, 366, 368; pil- 
loried and imprisoned, 366; his 
Review, 366; secret agent for 
the government, 367; master 
of the art of deception, 367; 
Robinson Crusoe, 368; Journal 
of the Plague Year, 370; closing 
years, 371. 

Decker, Thomas, 262. 

Democracy, rise of modern, 399; 
advance of, in Victorian Eng- 
land, 517, 625. 

Democratic Federation, 639. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 482; ap- 
pearance and character, 482; 
opium-eater, 482; life, 483; at 
Oxford, 484; Wordsworth and 
Coleridge, 484, 485; entrance 
into English literature, 484; 
Confessions of an English 
Opium-Eater, 484, 488; trans- 
lates Lessing's Laocoon, 485; 
writes for magazines, 485; in 
Edinburgh, 485; as man of 
letters, 485; compared to Addi- 
son, 486; his diversity, 486; 
Murder Considered as one of the 
Fine Arts, 487; Flight of a Tar- 



INDEX. 



711 



tar Tribe, 487; Levana and Our 
Ladies of Sorrow, 487 ; his place 
in English prose, 487; general 
character of his works, 487; 
The Avenger, 488; Suspiria de 
Profundis, 488; Dream-Fugue 
on the Theme of Sudden Death, 
488; his style, 488. 

Dialects, 101. 

Dickens, Charles, 525, 558; 
Sketches by Boz, 525; one of 
the greatest novelists of the 
Victorian epoch, 558; Little 
Dorrit, 558; David Copperfield, 
558, 560, 625; Oliver Twist, 558; 
Bleak House, 558; Pickwick, 558; 
Our Mutual Friend, 559; as 
a humorist, 559; Edwin Drood, 
559; caricature, 559; Tale of 
Two Cities, 560, 624, 627, 630, 
639. 

Disraeli, Benjamin, 628, 631, 633. 

Dissenters, the, and Defoe, 365. 

Doddsley, William, 418; Collec- 
tion of Old Plays, 418. 

Donne, John, 267; his poetry, 271; 
poet of "wit," 272; his in- 
fluence, 272. 

Dowden, Edward, 553. 

Drama, English, before Shake- 
speare, 211; Elizabethan, 211; 
Shakespeare part of a dramatic 
period, 212; the preparation for 
the Elizabethan drama, 213; 
the liturgical drama, 214; the 
Miracle Plays, 214; the Moral 
Plays, 216; Interludes, 218; 
relation of miracle and moral 
plays to Elizabethan drama, 
218; beginning of the regular 
drama, 219; influence of patri- 
otism on, 220; historical plays, 
220; Shakespeare's predecessors, 
222; the theatre, 226; Shake- 
speare, 229; later Elizabethan 
drama and dramatists, 261; 
general survev, 263: decadence 
of, 266; Puritan hostility, 266, 
640; revival of, 641. 

Drayton, Michael, 221; Heroical 
Epistles, 221; Battle of Agin- 
court, 221; Polyolbion, 221. 

Drummond, William, 254. 



Dry den, John, 8, 309, 310, 312, 
340; poet laureate of the 
Restoration, 303, 315; con- 
trasted with Bunyan, 303; life, 
312; early poems, 313; Heroic 
Stanzas on the Death of Crom- 
well, 313; Astrea Redux, 313; as 
dramatist, 314; coarseness of 
his plays, 314; a time-server, 
315; Annus Mirabilis, 315; 
worldly success, 315; satires, 
316; Absalom and Achitophel, 
316; Mac-Flecknoe, 316; Religio 
Laid, 317; The Hind and the 
Panther, 317; later years, 317; 
character and work, 318; Essay 
of Dramatic Poesy, 319; his suc- 
cessors, 322. 

Dunbar, William, 161; true pred- 
ecessor of Burns, 161; The 
Thistle and the Rose, 162; 
Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, 
162; his Lament for the Makers, 
162; poet laureate, 163. 

Duns Scotus, 111. 

Dunstan, St., 35, 70. 

Dyer, John, 412; Grongar Hill, 
412; Fleece, 412. 

Earle,. John, 361; Microsmog- 
raphy, 361. 

Edgeworth, Maria, 406, 556; 
Castle Rackrent, 556; The Ab- 
sentee, 556; Helen, 556; novel of 
national manners, 556; gave 
Ireland a place in literature, 557. 

Edom o' Gordon, 166. 

Egypt, 633. 

Eighteenth century, some prose 
writers of the early, 380; 
abundance of prose literature, 
380; changes in England, 393; 
rise of Methodism, 394; deeper 
sympathy with man, 395, 405; 
expansion of England, 397; 
industrial and social changes, 
399; democracy and the age of 
revolution, 399; literature after 
the death of Pope, 400; Samuel 
Johnson, 401; characteristics 
of the new literature, 404; re- 
turn to Nature, 404; the new 
poetry of Man, 413; changes in 



712 



INDEX. 



poetic form, 414; Garrick and 
the Shakespearean revival, 417; 
the Mediaeval revival, 408, 418; 
summary, 420. 

Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 
562; life, 563; The Mill on the 
Floss, 564; Adam Bede, 564, 
566; her loss of faith in Chris- 
tianity, 564; assistant editor of 
the Westminster Review, 565; 
union with George Henry Lewes, 
565; Scenes of Clerical Life, 566, 
569; "new era" in her life, 566; 
The Spanish Gypsy, 566; death 
of Mr. Lewes and Marriage to 
John Walter Cross, 566; her 
death, 567; as novelist, 567; 
D,aniel Deronda, 567, 571; her 
place in literature, 567; on 
commonplace people, 569; Felix 
Holt, 571; Middlemarch, 571, 
572; high moral tone, 571; 
altruism, 572, 625; Silas Mar- 
ner, 572, 628. 

Elizabeth, reign of, its beneficent 
effect, 192; literature in, see 
English Renaissance; ap- 
pearance of the "third estate," 
195; the splendour of life, 195; 
dress, 195; delight in life, 197; 
Shakespeare's 'London, 198; 
national pride, 200; loyalty to 
the Queen, 201; summarv, 
201. 

Elizabethan Age, the, 49, 191, 625. 
See Elizabeth, reign of; Eng- 
lish Renaissance. 

Elizabethan literature, general 
survey of, 191 (see also Eng- 
lish Renaissance) ; prose, 246; 
summary of, 253. 

Elyot, Sir Thomas, 187; The 
Boke Named the Governor, 187. 

England (see also English Lit- 
erature; English People); 
geographical position of, and its 
advantages, 30; Elizabethan 
and Puritan, 258; expansion 
of, in the eighteenth century, 
397; expansion into a world 
power, 421; at the time of 
the French Revolution, 489; 
Victorian, 516, 623; growth of 



Imperialism, 634, 645 (see Vic- 
torian England). 

English Bible, the, and English 
prose, 188. 

English Chronicle, the, 68, 69. 

English language, 4; nationali- 
zation of, 4; Frenchified, 4; a 
composite tongue, 13, 102; Al- 
fred, founder of English prose, 
67; effect of the Norman Con- 
quest, 72, 94; very little written 
in English for a century and a 
half after, 84; revival of Eng- 
lish literature in thirteenth 
century, 84; Layamon's Brut 
almost wholly English, 86 
advance in literary importance 
87; French literature in, 88 
songs, 89; popular literature 
91; songs of the people, 91 
ballads, 92; enriched by mix- 
ture with Norman-French, 97 
triumph of, 99; in the schools 
after 1349, 100; patriotism, 100 
dialects, 101; modern, 102 
French element in, 102; Teu- 
tonic and Romance elements in, 
102. (See also English Lit- 
erature.) 

English literature: and English 
history, 1; chronological divi- 
sions of, 2; period of prepara- 
tion, 3, 11; influence of Chris- 
tian Church upon, 5, 33, 43; 
Italian influence, 5, 155; French 
influence, 7, 305; modern Eng- 
lish period, 8, 393; union of 
different races, languages, and 
literatures, 11; before the Nor- 
man Conquest, 11; continuity 
of its spirit, 21 ; Celtic influence. 
28, 46, 47, 77; Danish and 
Norman influence, 29; begin- 
ning of, 32; poetry in early, 33; 
Cffidmon, 49; Cynewulf, 54; 
Christianity and, 57; Aldhelm, 
58; in the South, 59; in the 
North, 59; Bede, 60; Alcuin, 
62; decline of Northumbria, and 
the coming of the Danes, 63; 
sources of literature and learn- 
ing destroyed, 63; revival of 
learning in the South, 64; Al- 



INDEX. 



713 



fred, 64; founder of English 
prose, 67; growth of English 
prose, 69; from Alfred to the 
Norman Conquest, 69; decline 
of literature, 71; the Norman 
Conquest to Chaucer (1066- 
cir. 1400), 72; effect of the Nor- 
man Conquest, 72; the Nor- 
man Conquest and previous in- 
vasions, 73; the Normans, 73; 
diversities in language and 
literature, 74; the Latin writers, 
75; Latin chroniclers, 76; Geof- 
frey of Monmouth, 78; other 
Welsh writers, 79; Norman- 
French literature, 80; romances, 
81; the Arthurian legends, 81; 
other French poetry, 83; litera- 
ture in English, 1066-1205, 84; 
revival of English literature in 
thirteenth century, 84; Laya- 
mon, 85; French literature in 
English, 88; English songs, 89; 
the popular literature, 91; the 
songs of the people, 91; bal- 
lads, 92; the religious drama, 
93; summary: effects of the 
Conquest on literature and lan- 
guage, 94; English language 
enriched and modified by Nor- 
man-French, 97; the triumph of 
English, 99; the French ele- 
ment in English, 102; the Age 
of Chaucer, 104; Period of 
the Italian Influence (1400 
to about 1660), 155; English 
literature of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, 164; the old ballads, 165; 
fifteenth-century prose, 168; 
beginning of the English 
Renaissance, 171; the dis- 
covery of the New World, 180; 
Copernicus, 180; the Reforma- 
tion, 181; the New Learning, 
182; growth of English prose, 
186; culmination of the English 
Renaissance, 191; Elizabethan 
literature, 194; Edmund Spen- 
ser, 202; the English Drama 
before Shakespeare, 211 
Shakespeare's predecessors, 222 
Marlowe, 224; the theatre, 226 
Shakespeare, 229 ; Elizabe- 



than prose/246; Richard Hooker, 
246; Francis Bacon, 246, 250; 
summary of Elizabethan litera- 
ture, 253; the England of Mil- 
ton, 257; later Elizabethan lit- 
erature, 261; poets of the early 
seventeenth century, 267; re- 
ligious poets, 273; Cavalier 
lyrists, 267, 275; Milton, 276, 
278; seventeenth-century prose, 
289; Bunyan, 295, 308; the 
England of the Restoration, 
305; John Dryden, 312; other 
Restoration writers, 319; Age 
of Pope, 322; Alexander 
Pope, 326; minor poets of 
Pope's time, 336; authorship 
in the Augustan Age and the 
rise of the new prose, 340; Sir 
Richard Steele, 344; Joseph 
Addison, 351; the novel, 357; 
Daniel Defoe, 363; Jonathan 
Swift, 372; other prose writers 
of the eighteenth century, 380; 
Arbuthnot, 381; Bolingbroke, 
382; Bishop Berkeley, 385; 
Richardson and Fielding, 
387; Modern English Period, 
393; rise of Modern Litera- 
ture, 393; Victorian Eng- 
land: its literature, 516; recent 
and contemporary literature, 
628-645. 
English people, elements in mak- 
ing of, 15; early home of, 16; 
life and character of, 17; the 
English and the sea, 18; religion, 
20; fatalism, 20; seriousness 
and reverence, 22; and Celts, 
24; landing of St. Augustine, 
46; the Church and culture, 46; 
intellectual influence of Ire- 
land upon, 46, 47; founding of 
monasteries and schools, 48; 
the coming of the Danes, 63; 
sources of learning and litera- 
ture destroyed, 63; Danes 
checked by Alfred, 63; revival 
of learning under him., 64; 
from Alfred to the Norman 
Conquest, 69; decline of litera- 
ture, 71; the Norman Conquest, 
72; effect of, 72; the Normans, 



714 



INDEX. 



73; diversities in language #nd 
literature, 74; Age of Chaucer, 
104; Renaissance period, 171; 
Age of Elizabeth, 191; Eng- 
land of the Restoration, 305; 
William and Mary, 317; Age of 
Pope, 322; modern English 
period, 393; Victorian England, 
516. 

English Prayer Book, first com- 
plete, 188. 

English Renaissance, 171, 418; 
revival of learning in Italy, 171; 
religious persecution, 173; de- 
cline of learning at Oxford, 173; 
preparation for the New Learn- 
ing in England, 175; William 
Caxton, 176; the "Oxford Re- 
formers," 177; humanism in 
England and Italy, 178; the 
English and the Italian Renais- 
sance compared, 179; the dis- 
covery of the New World, 180; 
Copernicus, 180; the Reforma- 
tion, 181; the New Learning at 
Court, 182; Wyatt and Surrey, 
183; Sackville, 184; Gascoigne, 
186; growth of English prose, 
186; the work of the trans- 
lators, 188; from the advent of 
Spenser to the* death of Ben 
Jonson, 191; freedom from re- 
ligious persecution, 192; pros- 
perity of the people, 193; growth 
of commerce, 193; extension of 
education, 193; monastic schools 
antagonistic to the New Learn- 
ing, 193; the splendour of life, 
195; dress, 195; Elizabethan 
delight in life, 197; Shake- 
speare's London, 198; national 
pride, 200; Edmund Spenser, 
202; the English Drama 
before Shakespeare, 211; 
Shakespeare, 229; Eliza- 
bethan Prose, 246; summary 
of Elizabethan literature, 253; 
high noon of the Renaissance, 
255; decline of the Renais- 
sance, 257; the England of Mil- 
ton, 257; later Elizabethan lit- 
erature, 261; poets of the early 
seventeenth century, 267; Mil- 



ton, 276, 278; seventeenth-cen- 
tury prose, 289; Bunyan, 295. 

Erasmus, Desiderius, 177, 183, 
255. 

Essays, eighteenth-century, 343. 

Eton College, 176, 636. 

Euphuism, 223. 

Evans, Marian: see Eliot, George. 

Fabyan, Chronicle of, 187. 

Fabyan Society, 639. 

Fairfax, translator of Tasso, 190. 

Farquhar, George, 321, 396. 

Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 642. 

Feudalism, death-knell of, 107. 

Fielding, Henry, 357, 390; con- 
trasted with Richardson, 390; 
his literary form, 391; Adven- 
tures of Joseph Andrews, 391; 
Byron on, 391; Tom Jones, 391, 
627. 

Fifteenth century, English litera- 
ture of, 164; prose, 168; Mal- 
ory's Morte d' 'Arthur, 169. 

Fletcher, Giles, 268; Christ's Vic- 
tory and Triumph in Heaven and 
Earth over and after Death, 268; 
compared with Spenser and 
Milton, 269. 

Fletcher, John, 262 (see also Beau- 
mont and Fletcher). 

Fletcher, Phineas, 268; The Pur- 
ple Island, 269. 

Ford, John, 262. 

Fourteenth century, literature in 
the, 112. 

Freeman, Edward A., 551 ; His- 
tory of the Norman Conquest, 
551, 629. 

French influence, period of (1660- 
cir. 1750), 7, 305; the England 
of the Restoration, 305; the 
Age of Pope, 322. 

French Revolution, the, and Eng- 
lish , literature, 9, 450, 469, 
489. 

Froissart, 105, 109, 137, 187. 

Froude, James Anthony, 552; 
great prose writer, 553; His- 
tory of England, 553, 629. 

Fuller, Thomas, 293; Church His- 
tory of Britain and Worthies of 
England, 293. 



INDEX. 



715 



Gaels, or Goidels, the, 23. 

Gaimar, Geoffrey, 82. 

Gairdner, James, 552. 

Galsworthy, John, 629, 639, 640. 

Garter, Order of the, 106. 

Gascoigne, George, 184, 186; first 
prose-comedy in English, 186; 
The Supposes, 186; Jocasta, 186; 
The Steel Glass, 186. 

Gaskell, Elizabeth, 557; Cran- 
ford, 557; Mary Barton, 557. 

Gay, John, 337; Fables, 338; 
Trivia, 338, 339; The Shep- 
herd's Week, 338; as a realist, 
339 

Geats, or Goths, 38, 40. 

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 14n., 77, 
81; Sabrina, 14, 78; King Lear, 
78; F err ex and Porrex, 78; 
King Arthur, 78. 

Germania, 16. 

Gibbon, Edward, 403; Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire, 403. 

Gibson, "Wilfred Wilson, 638. 

Gissing, George Robert, 639. 

Gladstone, William Ewart, 629. 

Gleeman, the, defined, 35. 

Godwin, William, 519, 556; Caleb 
Williams, 519, 556. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 407, 413, 420, 
422; Chinese letters, 407; The 
Hermit, 420; in Ireland, 422; 
Deserted Village, 413, 423, 426; 
some characteristics, 423; Vicar 
of Wakefield, 423, 426, 427; 
Citizen of the World, 424, 425, 
427, 428; at Trinity College, 
Dublin, 424; Edinburgh and 
the Continent, 424; The Travel- 
ler, 413, 424, 425; in London, 
425; Enquiry into the State of 
Polite Learning in Europe, 425; 
makes acquaintance of Dr. 
Johnson, 425; charm and at- 
tractiveness of style, 425; The 
Good-natured Man, 426; She 
Stoops to Conquer, 426; place in 
literary history, 427; The Bee, 
427. 

Gordon, Adam Lyndsay, 635. 

Goths, 38, 40. 

Gower, John, 83, 101, 150. 

Grafton, 187. 



Gray, Thomas, 407, 412; Elegy, 
410, 412, 413. 

" Greek learning," effect of, 6. 

Green, John Richard, 551; Short 
History of the English People, 
552. 

Greene, Robert, 222, 256; his 
works, 224; A Groat's Worth of 
Wit Bought with a Million of 
Repentance, 224; Friar Bacon 
and Friar Bungay, 224. 

Gregory, Pope, 46, 64; his Pas- 
toral Care, translated by Alfred, 
64n., 65; Shepherd's Model, or 
Regula (or Cura) Pastoralis, 66. 

Grocyn, William, 177, 255. 

Grote, George, 551; History of 
Greece, 551. 

Hadrian (Adrian), 47, 48, 57, 67. 

Haggard, H. Rider, 629, 635. 

Hakluyt's Voyages, 254. 

Hall, Chronicle of, 187. 

Hall, Joseph, 361; Characters' of 
Virtues and Vices, 361. 

Hallam, Arthur Henry, 597. 

Hallam, Henry, 551. 

Handel, 396; Hallelujah Chorus, 
396. 

Hankey, Donald, 645. 

Hardy, Thomas, 578; poetic 
character, 578; life, 579; Des- 
perate Remedies, 579 ; Far from 
the Madding Crowd, 579, 580; 
The Return of the Native, 625, 
626, 628; as an interpreter of 
Nature, 579; his view of life, 
580; flaw in his art, 581; his 
place in fiction, 581. 

Harrington, translator of Ariosto, 
190. 

Harrison, Frederic, 553. 

Hathaway, Anne, 230, 233. 

Hawes, Stephen, 157; Pastime of 
Pleasure, 157. 

Hazlitt, William, 261, 519, 521. 

Henley, W. E., 629, 635; London 
Voluntaries, 636-638. 

Henry VIII., 182; patron of art 
and learning, 182, 255. 

Henryson, Robert, 160; Robyne 
'and Makyne, 161; his Testament 
of Cresseid, 161; Fables, 161. 



716 



INDEX. 



Henslowe, Philip, Elizabethan 
play-broker, 263n. 

Herbert, George, 267, 273, 307. 

Herrick, Robert, 275, 429; Corin- 
na's Going a-Maying, 275; and 
Milton, 276; rural England, 
276; pagan spirit, 276; Hes- 
■perides and The Noble Numbers, 
276; natural temper, 276. 

Heywood, John, 217, 218; Inter- 
ludes, 218, 255; The Four P's, 
218 

Heywood, Thomas, 262, 264. 

Historical plays, Elizabethan, 220; 
English, 237. 

Historical writing, era in, 403. 

Hoccleve: see Occleve. 

Holinshed, Chronicle of, 187. 

Holy Alliance, the, 490. 

Holy Grail, the, 82; Tennyson on, 
607-9. 

Hooker, Richard, 246, 247, 289; 
Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 
248, 625. 

Hornung, Ernest William, 635. 

Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 
183, 340. 

Howard, John, 395. 

Humanism, in England and Italy, 
178. 

Hume, David, 403. 

Hundred Years' War, 100, 105, 
107; English people in, 107. 

Hunt, Leigh, 507; friendship with 
Keats, 507; head of the "Cock- 
ney School," 508. 

Hunt, William Holman, 582. 

Hurd, Richard, 419; Letters on 
Chivalry and Romance, 419. 

Huxley, Professor, 524, 625, 629. 

Hyde, Douglas, 642. 

Iliad and Odyssey, 357. 

Imperialism, growth of, 633. 

Industrial problems, 639. 

Ireland, important factor in Eng- 
land's education, 47; drama- 
tists in, 641; literary revival in, 
642; (see also Celts). 

Irish Literary Theatre, founded, 
643. 

Italian influence, period of the, 5, 
155; followers of Chaucer and 



decline of Mediaeval literature, 
155; beginning of the English 
Renaissance, 171; the New 
Learning^ 182; culmination of 
the English Renaissance, 191; 
decline of the English Renais- 
sance, 257. 

James I., of England, 302; trans- 
lation of the Bible, 302. 

James I., of Scotland, 159, 160; 
his literary influence in Scot- 
land, 159; King's Quair, 160. 

James, G. P. R., 557. 

Jeffrey, Thomas, first editor of 
The Edinburgh Review, 520. 

John of Trevisa, 123; translator 
of the Polychronicon of Ralph 
Higden, 124. 

Johnson. Hester (Swift's "Stella"), 
376, 378. 

Johnson, Samuel, 272, 401; great 
personal force, 401; London, 
401, 403; Vanity of Human 
Wishes, 401; The Rambler, 401, 
403; The Idler, 401; English 
Dictionary, 401; literary auto- 
crat of London, 402; Macaulay 
on, 402; personal peculiarities, 
402; Rasselas, 403; Vanity of 
Human Wishes, 403; Lady 
Mary Wortley Montague on 
style of, 403; Johnson on Wil- 
liam Collins, 412, 628. 

Jones, Henry Arthur, 640. 

Jonson, Ben, 256, 262; Every 
Man in his Humour, 262; a 
playwright, 264; a realist, 265; 
Sejanus, Catiline, 265; his lyr- 
ics, 266; Cy?ithia , s Revels, 361. 

Joyce, Dr. Patrick, 642. 

Junius, Letters of, 421. 

Jutes, the, 16, 45. 

Keats, John, 504; Byron and 
Shelley, 504; points of differ- 
ence between the three, 504; 
his relation to literary history, 
505; life, 505; temperament, 
505; friendship of Charles Cow- 
den Clarke, 506; influence of 
Spenser's poetry, 506; limitation 
of Spenser, 507; settles in Lon- 



INDEX. 



717 



don, 507; studies medicine, 
507; meets Leigh Hunt, 507; 
an adherent of the " Cockney 
School," 507; Endymion and 
its critics, 508; rapid develop- 
ment, 509; Hyperion, 509; Eve 
of St. Agnes, 509, 511, 512; 
Ode on a Grecian Urn, 509, 512; 
infatuation for Miss Brawne, 
509; ill-health and death, 510; 
as a poet, 510; the worship of 
beauty, 510; as master of form, 
512; La Belle Dame sans Merci, 
512; his place as a poet, 512; 
his theory of poetry, 513; 
Lamia, 513; Matthew Arnold 
on, 514ft.; Keats's poetic limi- 
tations, 515, 625, 638. 

Keble, Bishop, 87; Christian Year, 
compared with Ormulum, 87. 

Kemble, John, -417. 

Kinglake, Alexander William, 551; 
Invasion of the Crimea, 551. 

King's English, 101. 

Kingsley, Charles, 518, 558, 575; 
Alton Locke, 558; Hypatia, 
Westward Ho! Hereward, 575. 

Kipling, Rudyard, 10; spokesman 
of "Greater England," 634; 
''Departmental Ditties," "Bar- 
rack Room Ballads," "Plain 
Tales from the Hills," "Soldiers 
Three," 629, 632, 634; Danny 
Deever, Fuzzy Wuzzy, 636, 638. 

Knight, Charles, 521. 

Kyd, Thomas, 222; Spanish Trag- 
edy, 222. 

"Lakists" (Lake School), the, 
484. See Coleridge; Southey; 
Wordsworth. 

Lamb, Charles, 460; and Cole- 
ridge, 460, 480; Essays of Elia, 
460, 481; his sister's insanity, 
480; Specimens of English Dra- 
matic Poets, 481; and Hazlitt, 
481; Tales founded on the Plays 
of Shakespeare, 481. 

Landor, Walter Savage, 521, 611. 

Lanfranc, 74, 75. 

Langland, William, 109-112; 
sketch of his life, 125; his 
Vision, 109, 121; synopsis of 



the poem, 128; the poet and 
his teaching, 131. 

Latimer, Hugh, 188. 

Layamon, 79, 85; End, 85, 86. 

Lecky, W. E. H., 552. 

Lee, Nathaniel, 319, 320. 

Leland, John, 187. 

Linacre, Thomas, 177, 255. 

Liturgical drama, the, 214. 

Locke, John, 321. 

Locke, William J., 640. 

Locrine, of Celtic origin, 28. 

Lodge, Thomas, dramatist, 256. 

Lollards, the, 173. 

London, literary centre in Chau- 
cer's time, 120; Shakespeare's, 
198; of Pope, 324; in Augus- 
tan Age, 343; coffee-houses of, 
343, 404; the Great Plague, 370; 
in recent poetry, 636. 

Louis XIV., patron of letters, 7, 
311. 

Lovelace, Richard, 267, 275. 

Lydgate, John, 156; Complaint of 
the Black Knight, 156; Story of 
Thebes, 157. 

Lyell, Sir Charles, 523; Principles 
of Geology, 523, 625. 

Lyly, John, 222, 256; Alexander 
and Campaspe, 223; Euphues, 
223; 359; Euphues, the Anat- 
omy of Wit, 223; Euphues and 
his England, 223. 

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 
402, 526; on Johnson, 402; 
essay on Milton] 526; Compen- 
dium of History, 526; Battle of 
Cheviot, 526; memory and com- 
mand of language, 526; his tem- 
perament, 527; essays, 528; 
History of England, 528; a pop- 
ularizer of knowledge, 529; es- 
timate of his work, 529; and 
India, 634. 

MacPherson, James, 407; legend 
of Ossian, 407. 

Maildulf, 58. 

Maldon, Song on the Battle of, 85. 

Malherbe, "tvrant of words and 
syllables," 311. 

Malorv, Sir Thomas, 169; his 
Morte d'Arthur, 169, 358; the 



718 



INDEX. 



most important book of the 
fifteenth century, 170. 

Mandeville, Sir John, Voyages and 
Travels of, 124. 

Map, Walter, 79. 

Marco Polo, Travels of, 124. 

Marlowe, Christopher, 222, 224, 
256; Edward 77., 222, 225; 
Tamburlaine, 225, 234; The Jew 
of Malta, 225; Dr. Faustus, 225. 

Marshall, Archibald, Exton Manor, 
630. 

Marston, John, 262. 

Martineau, Harriet, 565. 

Martineau, James, 565. 

Masefield, John, 629, 638; The 
Everlasting Mercy, The Widow 
in the Beye Street, Dunbar, 639. 

Massinger, Philip, 262. 

Mediaeval Revival, the, 408, 421. 

Meldun, 58. 

Meredith, George, 577; The Egoist, 
578; often compared with 
Browning, 578; The Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel, 578, 625, 626, 
628, 629. 

Merriman, Henry Seton, 635. 

Metaphysical school of poets, the, 
272. 

Methodism, rise of; 394. 

Middleton, Thomas, 262. 

" Mid- Victorian," term of re- 
proach, 623. 

Millais, John Everett, 582. 

Millman, Henry Hart, 551; His- 
tory of Latin. Christianity, 551. 

Milton, John, 7, 12, 256, 257; the 
England of, 257; Shakespeare 
and, 257, 288; religious and 
political liberty, 260; and Her- 
rick, 276; Lycidas, 276, 282; 
boyhood, 279; at Cambridge, 
279; at Horton, 279; V Allegro 
and II Penseroso, 280, 406, 429; 
Comus, 280; travels, 282; re- 
turn to England, 283; prose 
works, 283, 294; Epitaphium 
Damonis, 283; Tractate on Edu- 
cation, 283; Areopagitica, 283, 
294; Tenure of Kings and 
Magistrates, 283; later poetic 
period, 284; after the Restora- 
tion, 284; Paradise Lost, 284, 



406, 414; Paradise Regained, 
269, 285; Samson Agonistes, 
285, 286; his ideal of life, 286; 
his Puritan severity, 287; para- 
phrasers of, 414; the Miltonic 
sentence, 415, 631. 

Minot, Lawrence, 115. 

Miracle Plays, 93, 214; relation of, 
to Elizabethan drama, 218. 

Modern literature, rise of, 393; 
Walpole and Pitt, 396; literature 
after the death of Pope, 400; 
Samuel Johnson, 401; charac- 
teristics of the new literature, 
404; return to Nature, 404; 
new sympathy with man, 405; 
Mediaeval revival, 408, 418; 
Thomson, 410; Gray, Collins, 
Dyer, etc., 412; the new poetry 
of man, 413; changes in poetic 
form, 414; Garrick and the 
Shakespearean revival, 417; 
summary, 420; Goldsmith, 422; 
Burke, 429; Cowper, 436; 
Burns, 444; Wordsworth, 450; 
Coleridge, 459; Scott, 470; 
Lamb, 480; De Quince y, 482; 
later poets of the Revolution, 
489; Byron, 489, 491; Shel- 
ley, 489, 497; Keats, 504. 
Victorian England: its liter- 
ature, 516; periodical litera- 
ture, 520; popular literature, 
521; science and modern life, 
522; and modern thought, 523; 
the new era in literature, 525; 
Macaulay. 526; Carlyle, 529; 
Ruskin, 541; other prose 
writers: the historians, 549; 
Froude, 551; literary criticism, 
553; Matthew Arnold, 553; 
growth of the novel, 556; 
Dickens, 558; Thackeray, 
560; George Eliot, 563; Trol- 
lope, 572; Charles Reade, 573; 
Wilkie Collins, 573; romance, 
575; R. L. Stevenson, 575; 
Meredith, 577; Hardy, 577, 
579; recent poetrj^, 581; the 
Pre-Raphaelites, 582; Rosset- 
ti's poetry, 584; William 
Morris, 586; Swinburne, 590; 
Arnold, Clough, and Thomson, 



INDEX. 



719 



593; the poetry of faith and 
hope, 594; Tennyson, 594; 
Robert Browning, 610; the 
end of the era, 623; the present 
and the future, 623; the Celtic 
Revival, 624. 

Monastic historians, 76. 

Monk-scholar, the, denned, 57. 

Monmouth, Duke of, 316. 

Moore, Thomas, 399, 491; Lalla 
Rookh, 399. 

Moral Plays, 216; relation of, to 
Elizabethan drama, 218. 

More, Sir Thomas, 177; his Uto- 
pia, 179, 255, 359; History of 
King Richard the Third, 187. 

Morgan, William dc, 630. 

Morris, William, 586; household 
decoration, 587; seeks to stim- 
ulate a national love of the 
beautiful, 587; influence of 
Rossetti, 587; Defence of Guin- 
evere and other Poems, 587 
Life and Death of Jason, 587 
The Earthly Paradise, 588, 630 
his spirit essentially pagan, 589 
a fighter and a reformer, 589 
socialistic work, 589; Dream of 
John Ball, 589; Sigurd the 
Volsung, 589, 626, 629. 

Motherwell, 419; Ancient Min- 
strelsy, 419. 

Mythology of the early English, 
20. 

Nash, Thomas, forerunner of the 

realistic novelists, 360; Pierce 

Penniless, 360. 
National song of England, 411. 
Nature, return to, in literature, 

399, 405; poetry of, 408; new 

era in, 410, 416. 
Newbolt, Henry John, Admirals 

All, 635; Clifton Chapel, The 

Only Son, 636. 
Newman, John Henrv, 548, 625, 

629. 
Newspapers, modern, 519, 520. 
New Testament, Tyndale's, 188. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 321, 625. 
Norman-French, 75; literature, 80. 
Norman Conquest, from Alfred to 

the, 69; effect of the, 72; 



literature from the Conquest 
to Chaucer, 72; previous inva- 
sions and the, 73; infuses new 
life into the Church, 75; sum- 
mary: effects of, on literature 
and language, 94. (See also 
Normans.) 

Normandy, 31. 

Normans, influence of, upon Eng- 
lish literature, 5; who they 
were, 73; diversities in language 
and literature brought into 
England by, 74; English bish- 
ops replaced by, 75 ; their civili- 
zation Latin and Southern, 94. 

North, Sir Thomas, translator of 
Plutarch's Lives, 189. 

Northumbria as intellectual centre 
of Western Europe, 57, 59; 
decline of, and the coming of 

| the Danes, 63. 
^Novel, history of the, 357; origin, 
357; romance in England, 358; 
seventeenth-century romances, 
360; the realistic school of 
fiction, 360, 391; "character- 
writers," 361; the essay and 
the novel, 361; Defoe, 363; 
Richardson, 387, 388; novel 
of domestic life, 387; Fielding, 
387,390; Smollett, 391; Gothic 
revival in fiction, 392; growth 
of the novel in the Victorian 
Age, 556, 624; novel of national 
manners, 556. 

Noyes, Alfred, 629, 631, 645. 

Nut-Brown Maid, the, 167. 

Occleve (or Hoccleve), Thomas, 
156; Gouvernail of Princes, 156. 

O'Currie, Eugene, 642. 

Oliphant, Margaret, 557; Chroni- 
cles of Carlingford, 557. 

Ormulum, 87. 

Ossian, 407. 

Otway, Thomas, 319; The Or- 
phans, 320; Venice Preserved, 
320. 

Overbury, Sir Thomas, 361; Char- 
acters, 361, 362. 

Oxenham, John, 645. 

Oxford, Italian influence upon, 6; 
decline of learning at, in the 



720 



INDEX. 



fifteenth century, 173; colleges 
founded at, 176; the "Oxford 
Reformers," 177, 259. 

Paris, Matthew, 77. 

Parliament, the Good, 107. 

Parnell, Thomas, 339; as Nature 
poet, 340. 

Pater, Walter, 553, 625; Child in 
the House, 627, 628, 629. 

Peele, George, 223, 256; his works, 
224; The Arraignment of Paris, 
224; Farewell to Sir John 
N orris, 224. 

Percy, Bishop, 407, 419; Reliques 
of Ancient English Poetry, 419, 
420. 

Phaer, Thomas, translator of 
Virgil, 255. 

Phillips, Stephen, 629; Marpessa, 
631; Paola and Francesca, 
640. 

Phillpotts, Eden, 640. 

Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing, 641. 

Pitt, William, 395, 397, 400. 

Plague, the Great (London), 370. 

Poetry, large place of, in early 
English literature, 33; of Na- 
ture, 408; Wordsworth and 
Burns, on, 445; Victorian, 581, 
625; the lyric, '582; the Pre- 
Raphaelites, 582; aesthetic 
school of, 584; the poetry of 
faith and hope, 594, 644. 

Pope, Alexander, 8, 322, 326; 
life, 327; The Pastorals, 327; 
Essay on Criticism, 328; The 
Rape of the Lock, 329, 335, 401; 
Windsor Forest, 331; Transla- 
tion of Homer, 331; Twicken- 
ham, 332; The Dunciad, 333, 
334; last poems, 334; Essay on 
Man, 334, 335, 401; Moral 
Essays, 334; Imitations of Hor- 
ace, 334; Epistle to Dr. Arbuth- 
not, 334, 381; spokesman of his 
time, 335; his character, 335; 
realism in, 339; literature after 
death of, 400; favorite metre, 
415, 628. (See also Age of 
Pope.) 

Prayer Book, English, compiled 
by Cranmer, 188. 



Pre-Raphaelites, the, 582; foun- 
ders of the Brotherhood, 582; 
The Germ, 583; Dante Ga- 
briel Rossetti, 583, 625; aloof- 
ness from actual life, 585; 
William Morris, 586, 626; 
Swinburne, 590, 631, 632. 

Press, freedom of, in the Augus- 
tan Age, 342. 

Prior, Matthew, 336; Solomon on 
the Vanity of the World, 337-, 
Alma; or, The Progress of the 
Mind, 337; master of the lighter 
forms of verse, 337. 

Prose, Biblical, see Bunyan; 
Elizabethan, 246; Steeled Tal- 
ler begins new era in, 347; in 
early eighteenth century, 380; 
Age of, 402; in Victorian Age, 
625. 

Puritan and Elizabethan England, 
196, 258; hostility to the stage, 
266. 

Puritan, the, fails in his task, 
305; protest against the, 306. 

Puttenham. George, 254. 

Quarles, Francis, 273. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 254, 289, 293, 
340; History of the World, 289, 
293. 

Ramsay, Allan, 408; The Ever- 
green, 409; Tea Table Miscel- 
lany, 409; Gentle Shepherd, 409. 

Reade, Charles, 573; a rough but 
forcible writer, 573; Christie 
Johnstone, It is never too Late to 
Mend, Put Yourself in His 
Place, 573; The Cloister and 
the Hearth a great masterpiece 
of narration, 573, 625. 

Realism, Imperialism and, 633. 

Reformation, the, 111, 258. 

Renaissance, English, see Eng- 
lish Renaissance; Italian, 5, 
Celtic, 641. 

"Renaissance of Wonder," the, 
413, 585. 

Restoration, the, under Charles 
II., 305; results, 305; protest 
against the Puritan, 306; sur- 
vivors of the older literature, 



INDEX. 



721 



307; the French influence, 308, 
310; signs of the time in liter- 
ary style, 309; effects of the 
new style on literature, 310; 
John Dryden, 312; other Res- 
toration writers, 319, 321; trag- 
edy, 319; comedy, 321, 640; 
characteristics of the literature 
of, 400. 

Revival of learning, 172. 

Revolution of 1688, effect of, on 
authorship, 341; later poets of 
the, 489. 

Revolution, French, see French 
Revolution. 

Rhymer, Thomas, 309. 

Richard I., King, 83; a trouba- 
dour, 83. 

Richardson, Samuel, 388; his 
novels, 389; their object, 389; 
Pamela, 388, 389, 391; Clarissa 
Harlowe, a triumph of portrait- 
ure, 389, 391; Sir Charles Grand- 
ison,SS9] Grandison a buckram 
hero, 390; influence on litera- 
ture, 390. 

Rivers, Lord, brother-in-law of 
Edward IV., translator of first 
book printed in England, 174. 

Robert of Gloucester, 72, 100; 
Rhyming Chronicle, 72, 100. 

Robertson, William, 403. 

Robin Hood ballads, 92. 

Robinson, Henry Crabbe, 463; 
Diary, 463. 

Robinson, Ralph, 188; translator 
of More's Utopia, 188. 

Rochester, Lord, 307. 

Roland, Song of, 81. 

Rolle, Richard, of Hampole, 113; 
abandons Latin for _ English, 
114; his prose, 114; his poetry, 
114; The Prick of Conscience, 
114, 115. 

Romances, Norman-French, 81; 
fourteenth-century, 116; the 
romance in England, 358; 
seventeenth-cent ury, 360. 

Roman Christianity, 47. 

Romanticism, rise of, 625, 628. 

Roscommon, Earl of, 309; trans- 
lator of Horace's Art of Poetry, 
309. 



Rossetti, Christina, 583. 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 582; the 
Pre-Raphaelites, 583; influence 
on poets and painters, 583; 
began the study of art at four- 
teen, 583; writer of verse from 
early childhood, 583; The 
Blessed Damozel, 583, 586; 
Poems, 584; temperament, 584; 
pitiable last years, 584; his 
poetry, 584; at heart a mystic, 
585; The Burden of Nineveh, 
The King's Tragedy, The Last 
Confession, Sonnets, 586, 625, 
626, 628. 

Rossetti, William Michael, 583. 

Rowe, Nicholas, 418. 

Royal School of Science, 640. 

Royal Society, The, foundation 
of, 321. 

Rule, Britannia!, 411. 

Ruskin, John, 469, 525, 541; 
Salsctte and Elephanta, 525; ex- 
ponent of highest ideals, 541; 
prose-poet, 541; descriptions of 
Nature, 542; ideas of beauty 
and art, 543; The Queen of the 
Air, 544; his fundamental art 
principle, 544; a great moral 
teacher, 544; literary work, 545; 
Modern Painters, 545; student 
and critic of art, 545; Seven 
Lamps of Architecture and Stones 
of Venice, 545; social reformer, 
469, 519, 546; Unto this Last, 
Crown of Wild Olive, Time and 
Tide, Fors Clavigera, 547; 
changes in style, 548, 625; The 
Garden of Proserpine, 626, 629. 

Russell, George W. ("A. E."), 
642. 

Sackville, Thomas, 184; Mirror 
for Magistrates, 185, 255; Gor- 
boduc or F err ex and Porrex, 220. 

Sagas, the, 37. 

Satan, the Caedmonic, 51. 

Saxons, the, 16, 45. 

Schreiner, Olive, 635. 

Science, age of, 625. 

Sc6p, the, defined, 35. 

Scotland, Chaucer in, 159; James 
I. and literature in, 159; Robert 



722 



INDEX. 



Henryson, 160; William Dun- 
bar, 161; the "Golden Age" of 
Scottish poetry, 163; civilisa- 
tion and literature of, 163; 
Lothian district, 164, 470, 471; 
Scottish literature the product 
of the Lowlands, 164; reaction 
from the Classical School, 408. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 408, 419, 451, 
470; Ancient Minstrelsy, 419; 
the Mediaeval Revival, 419; and 
Burns, 470; life, 470; Autobiog- 
raphy, 470; Sandyknowe, 471; 
Eve of St. John, 471; Red- 
gauntlet, 471, 472; Scottish 
scenery and life, 471; early 
translations, 472; Minstrelsy of 
the Scottish Border, 472; Lay of 
the Last Minstrel, 472; Mar- 
mion, 473; miscellaneous writ- 
ings, 473; and - Byron, 473; 
Waverley and the Waverley 
novels, 474; Ivanhoe, 474; Quen- 
lin Durward, 474; Count Robert 
of Paris, 474; prosperity and 
failure, 475; Journal, 475; death, 
476; character and work, 476; 
Carlyle on, 476; position in 
literature, 476; relation to his 
time, 477; ballads, 478; first 
master of historical fiction, 478; 
summary, 479; The Talisman, 
83; Rob Roy, 366n., 627. 

Sea supremacy, England's, 635. 

Seafarer, The, ISn. 

Sedley, Sir Charles, 307. 

Seeley, J. R., 552. 

Selkirk, Alexander, and Daniel 
Defoe, 369; Steele on, 369. 

Seventeenth century, poets of the 
early, 267; prose, 289, 293; 
romances of the, 360. 

Shaftesburv, Earl of, 316. 

Shakespeare, 22, 29, 174, 189, 198, 
222, 229; his English historical 
dramas, 174; his tragedies, 189; 
London in time of, 198; his 
predecessors, 222; his youth, 
229* Warwickshire, 230; Strat- 
ford grammar school, 232; mar- 
riage, 233; in London, 234* 
early work, 235; Venus ana 
Adonis, 235; Titus Andronicus, 



235; Henry VI., 235; Comedy of 
Errors, 235; Two Gentlemen of 
Verona, 235, 236; Love's La- 
bour's Lost, 235; A Midsummer 
Night's Dream, 233, 235, 236, 
237; Merchant of Venice, 236, 
243; Hamlet, 237, 240; The 
Tempest, 237; Richard II., 237; 
comedies: Much Ado about 
Nothing, 238; As You Like It, 
231, 238; Twelfth Night, 238, 
239; worldly prosperity, 238; 
Romeo and Juliet, 238; the Son- 
nets, 238; the tragic period, 239; 
Julius Ccesar, 239; studies of sin, 
240; Lear, 240, 241; Macbeth, 
219, 241; Othello, 241; rever- 
ence for goodness, 242; Measure 
for Measure, 243; his charity, 
244; last plays, 244; The Win- 
ter's Tale, 230, 231, 244; retire- 
ment to Stratford, 244; Shake- 
speare and the English genius, 
245; and Milton, 257, 288, 627. 

Shaw, George Bernard, 10, 629, 
639, 640, 641. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 497; con- 
trasted with Byron, 497; at 
Eton, 498; expelled from Ox- 
ford, 499; On the Necessity of 
Atheism, 499; marriage, 499 
Queen Mob, 499; second mar 
riage, 499; the Godwins, 500 
Alastor, 500; Revolt of Islam 
500; Prometheus Unbound, 501 
Hellas, 501; an intensely Chris- 
tian poet, 502; goes to the 
Continent, 502; Masque of An- 
archy, 502; his democratic sym- 
pathies, 502; death, 502; char- 
acter and work, 503; Witch of 
Atlas and Epipsychidion, 504; 
tribute to Keats's memory in 
Adonais, 504. 

Shenstone, 412; Schoolmistress, 
412, 415; Jemmy Dawson, 420. 

Shorthouse, J. H., 575; John 
Inglesant, 575, 625. 

Siddons, Mrs., 417. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 204, 254, 340; 
Arcadia, 359. 

Skelton, John, 157; characteristics 
of his verse, 158; compared to 



INDEX. 



723 



Rabelais and to Dean Swift, 
158; Dirge on Death of Edward 
IV., 158; Boke of Colin Clout, 
158; Why Come Ye not to Court, 
158; Boke of Philip Sparrow, 
158. 

Smiles, Samuel, 521. 

Smith, Adam, 403; Wealth of 
Nations, 403. 

Smollett, Tobias, 391; Roderick 
Random, 391; Peregrine Pickle, 
392; Humphrey Clinker, 392. 

Socialist League, 639. 

Somerville, William, 412; Chase, 
412. 

Sonnets, Shakespeare's, 238; Eliz- 
abethan, 254; Wordsworth's, 
458; Sonnets from the Portu- 
guese, Rossetti's, 586, 612, 631. 

Southey, Robert, 398, 451, 460, 
465; Curse of Kehama. 398; and 
Coleridge, 460; Fall of Robes- 
pierre, 460; Wat Tyler, 460. 

Spectator, the, 348, 353, 354, S9Qn. 

Spencer, Herbert, 10, 565, 567, 
625. 

Spenser, Edmund, 202; his life, 
203; Shepherd's Calendar, 204, 
255; The Faerie Queene, 205, 
255, 256; Mother Hubbard's 
Tale, 206; Epithalamion and 
Prothalamion, 207; his sad end, 
207; as a poet, 208. 

Spenserian school, the, 268. 

Stackpoole, H. de Vere, 635. 

Stage, Puritan hostility to the, 
266. 

Steele, Sir Richard, 8, 344; life, 
345; his Christian Hero, 346; 
comedies, 346; social reformer, 
346; The Gazette, 347; Tatler, 
347; Spectator, 348; political 
activity, 349; retirement and 
death, 349; character, 350; his 
work, 350; and Addison, 351, 
353, 356; The Englishman, 369, 
625. 

"Stella" (Hester Johnson), Swift's, 
376, 378. 

Stephen, Leslie, 553. 

Sterne, Lawrence, 392; The Life and 
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 
Gent., 392; A Sentimental Jour- 



ney through France and Italy, 
392 

Stevenson, R. L., 326, 575; Treas- 
ure Island, 576, 635; youthful 
joy in romance, 576; pictorial 
power, 576; Kidnapped, Master 
of Ballantrae, David Balfour, 
Weir of Hermiston, 576; essay- 
ist, critic, and poet, 577; Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Thrawn 
Janet, Will o' the Mill, Ms 
Triplex, 577; his requiem, 577, 
629. 

Stratford-on-Avon, 229, 230, 231, 
234, 238, 244. 

Stuarts, arbitral rule of, 260. 

Stubbs, Bishop, 551; Constitu- 
tional History of England, 551. 

Suckling, Sir John and Cavalier 
Lyrists, 275. 

Suez canal, 633. 

Surrey, Earl of (Henry Howard), 
183, 340. 

Swift, Jonathan, 8, 331, 372; 
character and early years, 372' 
enters the Church, 373; Tale of 
a Tub, 374, 378; Battle of the 
Books, 375; at Laracor, 375; 
Journal to Stella, 376; at St. 
Patrick's, Dublin, 376; political 
reverses, 376; Gulliver's Trav- 
els, 331, 377; compared to Rob- 
inson Crusoe, 377; insanity and 
death, 378; Swift and his time, 
379; contrasted with Boling- 
broke, 383; Modest Proposal, 
487, 625. 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 590; 
close friend of Morris, Burne- 
Jones, and Rossetti, 590; his 
temper, 590; Atalanta in Caly- 
don, 590; Poems and Ballads, 
591; Bothwell, Mary Stuart, 
Erictheus, Tristram of Lyonesse, 
591; volume of his work, 591; 
ultimate place among English 
poets, 591; much in common 
with Byron, 592; Hymn to 
Proserpine, Hymn to Man, 592; 
poetry anti-Christian, 593, 625, 
626, 628, 629. 

Symonds, John Addington, 553. 

Synge, John Millington, 644. 



724 



INDEX. 



Tabard Inn, 142, 143. 

Taller, the, 347, 348, 353, 354. 

Taylor, Jeremy, 290, 310; Rule 
and Exercises of Holy Dying, 29 1 . 

Taylor, Tom, 641. 

Temple, Sir William, 373. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 10, 525; and 
Browning, 594, 603; the repre- 
sentative poet of our era, 525, 
594; Nature and books, 595; 
classical element in his poetry, 
595; his life, 595; at Cam- 
bridge, 597; Timbuctoo, 597; 
Arthur Henry Hallam, 597; 
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 525, 597; 
Palace of Art, 597; loses his 
father and leaves Cambridge, 
598; death of Hallam, 598; 
In Memoriam, 598; settles in 
London, 599; his genius eclec- 
tic, 599; Locksley Hall and other 
poems, 600; marriage and 
appointment to the Laureate- 
ship, 601; Queen Mary, 601; 
the second Locksley Hall, 601; 
Demeter, 602; death, 602; his 
work, 603 ; as a poet of Nature, 
604; compared with Words- 
worth, 604; Maud, 604, 606; 
as poet of man, 605; social 
questions, 606^ The Princess, 
606; Aylmer's Field, 606; Idylls 
of the King a quasi-epic, 606; 
on the Holy Grail, 607, 609; 
poet of modern science, 609, 625; 
Crossing the Bar, 626; 628, 629, 
630, 631; Tithonus, 625. 

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 
10, 224, 525, 560; Newcomes, 
224; Yellowplush Papers, 525; 
Vanity Fair, 560: spirit of his 
work, 560; a genial satirist, 
561; Pendennis, 561; Henry 
Esmond, 561, 562; The Vir- 
ginians, 562; Lectures on the 
English Humourists, 562; his 
style, 562, 624. 

Theatre, the Elizabethan, 226. 

Theodore of Tarsus, 47, 57, 67. 

Thompson, Francis, 629, 644. 

Thomson, James, 408, 410, 412, 
416; Seasons, 410, 415; Castle 
of Indolence, 415. 



Thomson, James (the later), 593, 
594; City of Dreadful Night, 
593; abandonment to joy, 593; 
He Heard her Sing, 593; Sun- 
day at Hampstead, Sunday up 
the River, 593. 

Tiptoft, John, Earl of Worcester, 
174, 175. 

Tom Brown's School Days, 627. 

TotteVs Miscellany, 184, 255. 

Tourneur, Cyril, The Revenger's 
Tragedy, 266n., The Atheist's 
Tragedy, 266n. 

Traherne, Thomas, 273. 

Transvaal, 635. 

Trafalgar Square, 637. 

Trollope, Anthony, 572; The War- 
den, 572; commonplaceness, 
573; humour, 573, 628, 630. 

Tyndale, William, 188; his Bible, 
188, 259. 

Tyndall, John, 625. 

Udall, Nicholas, 220; Ralph Rois- 
ter Doister, 220, 255. 

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 321. 

Vaughan, Henry, 273. 

Victoria, Queen, passing of, 624, 
633. 

Victorian England, 9, 516; ad- 
vance of democracy, 517, 625; 
removal of religious disabilities, 
517; extension of suffrage, 518; 
diffusion of knowledge and 
literature, 519; the great news- 
papers, 519; periodical litera- 
ture and the great reviews, 
520; period of literary criticism, 
520, 521; popular literature, 
521; advance of science, 522, 
625; science and modern life, 
522; science and modern 
thought, 523; the new era in 
literature, 525 ; Macaulay, 526; 
Carlyle, 529; Ruskin, 541; 
the historians, 549; the Vic- 
torian Age and English litera- 
ture, 549; Froude, 549; liter- 
ary criticism, 553; Arnold, 
553; growth of the novel, 556; 
Charles Dickens, 558; Thack- 
eray, 560; George Eliot, 563; 



INDEX. 



725 



A. Trollope, 572; Charles 
Reade, 573; Wilkie Collins, 
574; the Brontes, 574; romance, 
575; R. L. Stevenson, 575; 
Meredith, 577; Hardy, 577, 
579; recent poetry, 581; the 
Pre-Raphaelites, 582; William 
Morris, 586; Swinburne, 590; 
Arnold, Clough, and Thomson, 
593; Tennyson, 594; Robert 
Browning, 610; the end of an 
era, 623; the present and the 
future, 623 ff.; the new era, 628. 

Wallace, Alfred Russell, 524, 625. 

Waller, Edmund, 309. 

Walpole, Horace, 392, 398, 400, 

419; Castle of Otranto, 392, 419. 
Walpole, Robert, 396. 
Walton, Izaak, 294, 307, 340; 

Complete Angler, 294. 
Wanderer, The, 21. 
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 519; Mar- 

cella, 519, 629. 
Warner, William, 221; Albion's 

England, 221. 
Warwickshire, in Shakespeare's 

day, 230. 
Watson, William, 629; The Prin- 
ce's Quest, Lachrymae Musa- 

rum, Wordsworth's Grave, 630, 

631, 632. 
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 553; 

"Renaissance of Wonder," 585; 

classes of poets, 602. 
Webster, John, 262. 
Wells, H. G., 629, 640, 645. 
Wellington, saying of, 636. 
Welsh Marches, 78. 
Welsh writers, 78, 79. 
Wesley, John, 394, 397. 
Whig and Tory, 341, 367. 
Whitfield, George, 394. 
Widsith, 36. 

Wilberforce, Bishop, 395. 
Wilde, Oscar, 629, 632, 640. 
Wilkes, John, 421. 



William and Mary, 317, 341; 
decline of the power of the 
crown, 341; social reform, 347; 
Defoe's pamphlet in defence of, 
365. 

William of Malmesbury, 76, 95; 
Gcsta Regum Anglorum, 77; 
Historia Novella, 77. 

William of Occam, 111. 

Wit, Dr. Johnson's definition of, 
272. 

Woolner, Thomas, 582. 

Wordsworth, William, 339, 406, 
413, 450; realism in, 339; Ode 
on the Intimation of Immortality, 
406; on poetry, 445; and the 
French Revolution, 451; life, 
452; An Evening Walk, 453; 
Descriptive Sketches, 453; and 
Coleridge, 453, 459; Lyrical 
Ballads, 454; Poet Laureate, 
454; as a poet of Nature, 454; 
limitations of his view of Na- 
ture, 457; The Solitary Reaper, 
458; Lucy, 458; sonnets, 458; 
The Excursion, 458; odes, 458; 
poet of democracy, 458; Mat- 
thew Arnold on, 459; associa- 
tion with Coleridge, 461, 630, 
631, 637. 

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 183, 340. 

Wycherley, William, 321, 396. 

Wycliffe, John, 111, 112, 121, 259; 
his Bible, 123; "Father of 
English Prose," 123; spirit of 
the Reformation anticipated 
by, 175. 



Yeats, William Butler, 629, 642; 

The Wandering of Oisin, The 
Countess Kathleen, On Baile's 
Strand, Deirdre, The Shadowy 
Waters, Cathleen ni Houlihan, 
643, 644. 
Young, Edward, 400; Night 
Thoughts, 400. 



i!5K RY 0F CONGRESS. 



022 052 608 2 



iiwi 



n Hit! 



